Translated Texts for Historians
This series is designed to meet the needs of students of ancient and medi¬
eval history and others who wish to broaden their study by reading source
material, but whose knowledge of Latin or Greek is not sufficient to allow
them to do so in the original language. Many important Late Imperial and
Dark Age texts are currently unavailable in translation and it is hoped that
TTH will help to fill this gap and to complement the secondary literature
in English which already exists. The series relates principally to the period
300-800 AD and includes Late Imperial, Greek, Byzantine and Syriac texts
as well as source books illustrating a particular period or theme. Each vol¬
ume is a self-contained scholarly translation with an introductory essay on
the text and its author and notes on the text indicating major problems of
interpretation, including textual difficulties.
Editorial Committee
Sebastian Brock, Oriental Institute, University of Oxford
Averil Cameron, Keble College, Oxford
Henry Chadwick, Oxford
John Davies, University of Liverpool
Carlotta Dionisotti, King’s College, London
Peter Heather, University College, London
Mark Humphries, National University of Ireland, Maynooth
William E. Klingshirn, The Catholic University of America
Michael Lapidge, Clare College, Cambridge
Robert Markus, University of Nottingham
John Matthews, Yale University
Claudia Rapp, University of California, Los Angeles
Raymond Van Dam, University of Michigan
Michael Whitby, University of Warwick
Ian Wood, University of Leeds
General Editors
Gillian Clark, University of Bristol
Mary Whitby, University of Liverpool
Front cover illustration: The Arch of Constantine, Rome, from a drawing in J.A. Dosio, Urbis
Romanae aedificiorurn illustrium quae supersunt reliquiae (Florence, 1569)
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A full list of published titles in the Translated Texts for Histori¬
ans series is available on request. The most recently published
are shown below.
Ruricius of Limoges and Friends: A Collection of Letters from Visigothie Gaul
Translated with notes and introduction by RALPH W. MATHISEN
Volume 30: 272pp.. 1998, ISBN 0-85323-703-4
The Armenian History attributed to Sebeos
Translated with notes by R. W. THOMSON, Historical commentary by JAMES
HOWARD-JOHNSTON. Assistance from TIM GREENWOOD
Volume 31 (in m'o parts): 240 pp., 224 pp.. 1999, ISBN 0-85323-564-3
The Chronicle of Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite
Translated with notes and introduction by ERANK R. TROMBLEY and JOHN W. WATT
Volume 32: 240pp., including 3 map.s and 2 plan.s, 2000, ISBN 0-85323-585-6
The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius Scholasticus
Translated with an introduction and notes by MICHAEL WHITBY
Volume 33: 454pp.. 2000, ISBN 0-85323-605-4
Antioch as a Centre of Hellenic Culture, as Observed by Libanius
Translated with an introduction and notes by A. F. NORMAN
Volume 34: 224pp.. 2000, ISBN 0-85323-595-3
Neoplatonic Saints: The Lives of Plotinus and Proclus by their Students
Translated with an introduction and notes by MARK EDWARDS
Volume 35: 224pp.. 2000, ISBN 0-85323-615-1
Politics, Philosophy and Empire in the Fourth Century: Select Orations of Themistius
Translated with an introduction by PETER HEATHER and DAVID MONCUR
Volume 36: 384pp.. 2001, ISBN 0-85323-106-0
A Christian’s Guide to Greek Culture: The Pseudo-Nonnus Commentaries on Sermons 4,
5, 39 and 43 of Gregory of Nazianzus
Translated with an introduction and notes by JENNIFER NIMMO SMITH
Volume 37: 208pp.. 2001, ISBN 0-85323-917-7
Avitus of Vienne: Letters and Selected Prose
Translated with an introduction and notes by DANUTA SHANZER and IAN WOOD
Volume 38: 472pp.. 2002, ISBN 0-85323-588-0
For full details of Translated Texts for Historians, including prices and or¬
dering information, please write to the following:
All countries, except the USA and Canada: Liverpool University Press,
4 Cambridge Street, Liverpool, L69 7ZU, UK (Tel h-44-[0] 151-794 2233
Fax -i-44-[0]151-794 2235, Email J.M. Smith@liv.ac.uk, http://www.liver-
pool-unipress.co.uk). USA and Canada: University of Pennsylvania Press,
4200 Pine Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6097, USA (7e/ h- 1-215-898-6264,
TaxH-1-215-898-0404).
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Translated Texts for Historians
Volume 39
Constantine and
Christendom
The Oration to the Saints
The Greek and Latin Accounts of
the Discovery of the Cross
The Edict of Constantine to Pope
Silvester
Translated with notes and introduction by
MARK EDWARDS
Liverpool
University
Press
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First published 2003
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool, L69 7ZU
Copyright © 2003 Mark Edwards
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form without permission in writing from the publishers,
except by a reviewer in connection with a review for inclusion
in a magazine or newspaper.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A British Library CIP Record is available.
ISBN 978-0-85323-648-1
Reprinted 2007
Set in Times by
Koinonia, Manchester
Printed in the European Union by
Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow
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To Alexander, Lucian and Jacob
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction ix
Constantine; The Oration to the Saints 1
The Coming of the Holy Cross (Latin version) 63
Story of the Discovery of the Honourable and Life-giving Cross
(Greek version) 81
The Edict of Constantine to Pope Silvester 92
Bibliography 117
Maps
The Mediterranean World in the Age of Constantine 134
Byzantine Jerusalem 135
Mediaeval Rome 136
Index to the Oration to the Saints 137
Index to texts on the Discovery of the Cross 140
Index to the Edict of Constantine 142
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Three scholars have been kind enough to read through the entire typescript
of this volume. Mary Whitby’s comments on the structure and content of
the introduction have been invaluable, and her vigilance has enabled me
to avoid many inconcinnities and errors in the translation of the Oration
to the Saints. Averil Cameron offered suggestions on the bibliography, and
helped me to give a clearer and more comprehensive account of the tradi¬
tions surrounding Helena and the discovery of the Cross. In the course of
correcting the inaccuracies and omissions in my notes to the Donation, Ray¬
mond Davis has greatly enhanced my exiguous knowledge of Rome and the
Papacy in the eighth century. Michael Whitby and David Taylor have given
permission for the use of the map at the end of The Ecclesiastical History of
Evagrius Scholasticus (Liverpool University Press, 2000) as a prototype for
the map of Constantine’s empire in this volume; the map of Rome is based,
with the permission of the author and cartographer, on the one at the end of
Raymond Davis, Lives of the Eighth-Century Popes (Liverpool University
Press, 1992). The map of Jerusalem is reproduced, with the permission of
Oxford University Press, from The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Near
Eastern Archaeology (New York, 1997), vol. 3, p. 236. The cover design
is based, with the permission and assistance of the library staff at Christ
Church, Oxford, on a drawing in J.A. Dosio, Urbis Romanae aedificiorum
illustrium quae supersunt reliquiae (Florence, 1569). I also owe a debt of
gratitude to Robin Lane Fox, who introduced me to the Oration fifteen years
ago, and to Christ Church for its continuing support of my research. My wife
Mali has been my inspiration in this work, as in everything else.
July 2002 Christ Church, Oxford
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INTRODUCTION
The documents presented to English readers in this volume are united by
the name of Constantine, a well-known figure of whom we know too little.
His reputation states that he was the man who made Christianity the official
religion of the Roman Empire; it may therefore be surprising to many
readers that historians in the modern age have wondered whether Constantine
was a Christian, and that some (though not the majority) have returned a
negative answer. The first text in this volume, the Oration to the Saints, is
the only one that has a bearing on this question about the religion of the
man himself; if it is authentic, there is no doubt that he at least intended to
be a Christian. The other two pieces, legendary in content, are none the less
of great interest to historians, for it may be said without paradox that
mediaeval Christendom was shaped more by the acts attributed to
Constantine than by any that he actually performed. Two versions of the
Discovery (or Invention) of the Holy Cross are translated here, the Latin
being the longer one while the Greek is now presumed to be the older.
Whereas these are fictions, the Donation of Constantine is a fabrication,
and no other work of this kind was so artfully exploited or so angrily
derided in late mediaeval and renaissance Europe. I hope to show in my
notes and introduction that both forgeries, the Donation and the Invention of
the Cross, ought to command the admiration of historians and classicists
today, not only because they imposed upon the world for so long, but also
because as literary artefacts they are not devoid of subtlety or even innocent
of scholarship.
The Oration, on the other hand, is defended here as a genuine work of
Constantine. The reader should be advised that, while my view of its
authenticity is shared by most historians in the English-speaking world, the
date that I assign to it and my estimate of its motives are unusual enough to
be called eccentric. The arguments below draw heavily from, and sometimes
add a little to, the ones that I have advanced elsewhere in studies of a more
technical character. In the case of the other two texts I have followed the
views of other scholars, and even (where this was possible) a consensus,
though, as will become apparent, I have introduced some corollaries and
conjectures of my own. It has not always been possible to follow the
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
common method of historians, hy commencing with the ‘background’ then
proceeding to the text. The reason is that in all three cases much or all of the
background must be constructed from our reading of the text itself, and no
dissociation of the content from the context is permissible. Moreover,
another starting point must be chosen before we approach the texts, for all
study of religion in late antiquity or the early middle ages demands
preliminary reflection upon the usage of the word ‘Christian’. Eor the
purposes of this volume we must ask above all what factors might cause a
detached historian to apply it or deny it to a man such as Constantine.
GENERAL THOUGHTS ON THE CHRISTIANITY OF
CONSTANTINE
By reputation Constantine was the earliest Christian emperor, and a legion
of facts can be enrolled in defence of this tradition. In 306, on proclaiming
himself the emperor or Augustus of the west, he revoked the edicts against
the Christians that had been enacted in 303 by the emperors Diocletian and
Maximian. In 312 he entered Rome as the conqueror of Maxentius, his rival
in the west, and almost at once began to act as arbiter between Catholics and
Donatists in Africa. In 313 he joined Licinius, an aspirant to the eastern
throne, in announcing the repeal of legislation against the Church through¬
out the Empire; in 314 he summoned a council of bishops at Arles in Gaul;
in 321 he invaded the dominions of Licinius - now not only his co-regent but
his son-in-law - on the pretext of delivering the Christians from oppression;
having overthrown Licinius in 324, he presided over the first ecumenical
council at Nicaea in 325. By this time it was generally believed (on his own
report) that he had been converted by a sign from heaven shortly before his
seizure of Rome. In 330 he built a new capital at Constantinople, the ancient
Byzantium and modem Istanbul, where the erection of pagan altars was
forbidden. This city remained the seat of Christian emperors, with barely an
intermission, for 1100 years.
It is therefore not surprising that the question whether Constantine was a
Christian is a new one; historians from Eusebius in his own century to
Mommsen^ in the nineteenth never thought it profitable to ask it. To judge a
king by his words and not his deeds, though it may no longer be a pious
obligation, remains for scholars an axiom of neutrality, an acknowledgement
1 Mommsen (1996), 448 declares the question ‘immaterial’, but adds that Constantine
(whom he despises) was ‘not the genius that Burckhardt would like to make him out to be’.
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INTRODUCTION
XI
of the limits of inquiry. History leaves to God the intrigues of Rodrigo
Borgia, the egotism of Henry VIII, the treachery of his rivals and their
Catholic successors; to deny that they were Christians merely because they
were had Christians would be to misunderstand the usage of a time which
applied that term to any person who was neither Turk nor Jew. Constantine,
perhaps as bad a man as any of these, was also as loud as any of them in his
profession of Christianity; on this point the aspersions of his pagan critics -
Julian, Eunapius and Zosimus - lend angry confirmation to the praises of the
Church. At first sight, then, it seems that the Swiss historian Jacob
Burckhardt was guilty of a solecism against his own profession when he
doubted the sincerity of the emperor in his strident masterpiece. The Age of
Constantine the Great}
For all that, Burckhardt’s challenge was not misplaced. Constantine, in
contrast to the majority of European sovereigns who came after him, had
once espoused other gods and other practices than those of Christianity -
had indeed been at least a nominal persecutor of the sect - and after his
conversion he continued to allow a choice of religions to his subjects. Even
his own professions seem equivocal, as his coins did not eschew the solar
imagery that had previously betokened his allegiance to Apollo, and one of
his statues in the new capital at Constantinople is believed by some to have
taken Apollo Helios as its model.^ When names of pagan deities disappeared
from his panegyrics, they were not replaced by those of God or Christ.^ His
legislation is taken as a key to his beliefs, and yet it hallowed not the Sabbath
or the Lord’s day but the day of the sun, and seems to have tolerated public
sacrifice while suppressing only private divination."^ The subsidies to
churches under Constantine were unprecedented, but his legislation openly
winked at the rites of pagans even while it openly abused them.^ Worst of all,
the date and circumstances of his conversion were disputed in antiquity, but
1 Burckhardt (1880/1949).
2 Fowden (1991).
3 See Alfoldi (1948), 69-71 on this evasion, and 55-60 on the assimilation of Christianity to
the worship of the sun. On the latter topic see also Baynes (1931), 95-103, but contrast the
objections of Smith (1997) to the common view of Constantius I (father of Constantine) as a
solar monotheist.
4 On divination, especially with respect to the emperor’s fortunes, see Theodosian Code
16.10.1. The law against all sacrifices reported by Eusebius, Constantine 2.45 is not found in
the Theodosian Code, and would have rendered superfluous the prohibition of sacrifice in 341
under his sons Constantius and Constans {Theodosian Code 16.10.2).
5 See Theodosian Code 9.16.2, with the comment of Alfoldi (1948), 77, and compare the
tone of Oration, chapter 11.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
xii
even his Christian advocates agreed that he deferred his baptism to the eve of
death.'
The ends of faith will always coexist with those of prudence and
ambition in the piety of statesmen. But since the question ‘What was
Constantine if not a Christian?’ is susceptible of an answer that we could not
give in the case of Cromwell or Charlemagne, it is no anachronism to
suggest that his religion was a mere fa 9 ade, an instrument of policy. Perhaps
the strongest argument against this thesis is that it is not clear what an
emperor stood to gain by such a fraud. According to most estimates, the
Christians at that time were a small community, especially in the west; and
even if it were true (as it is not) that they made up in cohesion what they
lacked in numbers, the same or more could be said of the equestrian and
senatorial orders, which continued to supply the state with magistrates, and
the pagan cults with priests, up to the fall of the Roman Empire. Even in the
last years of the fourth century the Christians would appear to have made up
only half of the Senate in Rome,^ so why should Constantine set out to
estrange this wealthy and compact elite? We might say that it was not the
civil magistrates but the army that raised Constantine to the throne, and it is
probable that soldiers evinced a preference for cults that were not tied to
local monuments and hereditary priesthoods. But in that case, why forsake
the vaguer monotheism or henotheism of his early years, and ask his troops
to worship the feeble Galilean, rather than Mithras or the Unconquered Sun?
In any case the earliest date that is plausibly assigned to his conversion is the
day in 312 before he entered Rome and, after six years of fighting for his
title, exchanged the rule of arms for that of law.
Modern scholarship therefore seldom echoes Burckhardt’s judgment on
the architect of Christendom.^ On the other hand, one often meets the
opinion that, although he was not a hypocrite, he was bound to wander into
syncretism or at least into injudicious toleration, as he had only the most
imperfect familiarity with the creed of his own religion. Sometimes this is
stated a priori: Constantine, a mere soldier, could not have mastered
doctrines that are now known only to theologians educated at certain
universities. Two fallacies are embedded in this argument. As regards the
1 See Eusebius, Constantine 4.62-63, where Constantine avers that he had hoped to
undergo baptism in the Jordan.
2 See Ambrose, Letters 17 and 18, urging the demolition of the Altar of Victory in 384
against the petition of the prefect Symmachus. It is clear that neither combatant lacked
supporters in the Senate.
3 See especially now the animadversions of Drake (2000), 12-18.
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INTRODUCTION
xiii
obscurity of the doctrines, that is a twentieth-century perception, and there is
evidence that lay Christians of the fourth century, like those of the seven¬
teenth, were instructed in the minutest points of faith. As to the incapacity of
Constantine, he was the son of an emperor, and we ought not to slight the
intellect of a man who overcame the best commanders of his day, who when
he died could claim to have enjoyed the longest tenure of the Empire since
Augustus, and who, unlike most of his famous predecessors, contrived to
leave the entire realm to his sons.
But why, it may be asked, if he was not still flirting with his old religion,
did Constantine do so little to enforce the spread of Christianity? How is it
that he left it to his sons to outlaw sacrifice, to Gratian to banish sacerdotal
privilege, to the younger Theodosius to separate the pagans from their
livelihoods, and to the laity of the fifth century to sack the most famous
shrines?' A similar question might be put to any of his successors, for,
notwithstanding the modern vogue for talking of a ‘Christian persecution’,
the law was their only instrument, and they made no attempt to reciprocate
the tortures that had been applied to the bodies of the faithful by the
emperors and governors who preceded Constantine. Even if some temples
fell with imperial connivance, others were protected by decree.^ Some
historians trace this lukewarm policy to the strength of paganism or the
weakness of Christianity, but theories of this kind lose their plausibility
when we waive the dubious premiss that a religion must be intolerant
because it is exclusive. We inherit this belief from the epoch of the
Reformation, when diversity offended the pretensions of the state. The rulers
of the Constantinian Empire, if they listened to the churchmen who advised
them, will have rated philanthropia or humanity second only to faith itself;
and after all, those Christians who believe that they have a duty to be bigots
have some difficulty in annotating Christ’s injunctions against the use of
force.
It is generally agreed that the date of his baptism does not compromise
the veracity of Constantine: the sacrament was frequently postponed by
those who feared, with some authority in the New Testament and ecclesi-
1 On the slow attrition of paganism through Christian legislation see Salzman (1993).
2 See Theodosian Code 16.10.18-20. The buildings were preserved to be given over to
better purposes, but Christian eruptions against them (see e.g. Marinus, Proclus 15 and 28)
suffice to prove that they were still regai'ded as pagan centres. In Gaza, where the pagans were
a truculent majority even in the late fourth century, magistrates connived at the survival of
idolatrous practices in the shrine of Mamas, the local Zeus (Mark the Deacon, Life of Porphyry
of Gaza 28).
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
astical teaching, that sins committed after it might be inexpiable.* Nor
should we assume that the unbaptized would necessarily be ignorant, for the
rite was often preceded by a series of catechetical discourses. Those who
had yet to receive these, if they were literate, could discover all that was
requisite to salvation in the Bible, in commentaries and homilies, in encycli¬
cals and apologetic texts. We know of one apology by a contemporary of
Constantine, the treatise of Arnobius Against the Nations, which was written
by a Christian still awaiting his baptism.^ Evidently, therefore, there is
nothing in our knowledge of Constantine or of the Church that he adorned
which would forbid us to regard him as the author of the first document
translated in this volume, a defence of Christianity which is commonly
entitled the Oration to the Saints.
THE APOLOGETIC TRADITION BEFORE CONSTANTINE
Some prefatory remarks are necessary to the reading of the Oration.
Whether or not it was an ancient custom, it appears to be a law of modem
scholarship that every Greek or Latin text must be assigned to a genre. No
genre can be plausibly suggested for the oration except that of ‘apologetic’:
this adjectival noun, first coined by Christians to define a species of
literature, derives from the verb apologein, which means to offer a defence
in court.^ But whereas one who delivers an ‘apology’ {apologia) has only a
single client in view, most commonly himself, the defendant in ‘apologetic’
is not an individual but a cause or an intellectual tradition. The works of the
earliest Christian apologists retain a forensic colour, since, at a time when
Christianity is unlawful, they undertake to show that the charges laid against
the new religion are false, and that the policy of the magistrates is offensive
to Roman principles of justice. In the second century it is common form to
address a pagan magistrate, most usually the emperor, but all the surviving
treatises are too long, too hortatory and too copious in argument to have
1 See e.g. Heb. 10.26.
2 For an unusual conjecture as to the date and occasion of this work, see Edwai'ds (1999a),
198-99.
3 See further Price (1999), 115-16; Frede (1999), 225-31. The working definition of
apologetic adopted by the editors of this volume (p. 1) is that it is ‘the defence of a cause or
party supposed to be of paramount importance to the speaker’. It was Constantine’s contempor¬
aries Lactantius and Eusebius who first made lists of apologetic writings on behalf of Christ¬
ianity, and, while apologetic was thus established as a branch of ecclesiastical literature, it may
reasonably be doubted whether comparable traditions ever emerged among Jews or pagans.
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INTRODUCTION
XV
been designed to temper the severity of one man. Every Christian litigant
takes it upon himself not merely to prove that he and his co-religionists are
innocent, but to retaliate the jibes on the accusers: it is they, and not the
Christians, who are atheists, murderers, fornicators and worshippers of
imaginary gods.
There is no frontier between apologetic and polemic, for anyone on trial
before a jury would do well in his apologia to carry the battle back to his
opponents through derision, innuendo, hostile questioning and counter¬
accusation. In the most celebrated of all apologies - the speech that Plato
puts into the mouth of the philosopher Socrates at his trial before an
Athenian jury in 399 BC - there is also a foreshadowing of the genre that
philosophers called protreptic, as Socrates attempts to convince his judges
that his conscientious ignorance is a better path to wisdom than their
unreflective knowledge. But in a private apology these elements of polemic
or protreptic are subservient to the object of acquitting the defendant; in
Christian apologetic, on the other hand, they often swell to engross all but a
fraction of the text. The authors were, by their own account, rhetoricians and
philosophers, who will have been aware that oratory was conventionally
divided into three modes: the forensic for use in court, the symbouleutic or
deliberative which was suited to political assemblies, and the epideictic or
theatrical, which during the second century was the stock-in-trade of
itinerant performers known as sophists.* Once again the boundaries are not
rigid, for no-one could have hoped to sway a judge or move the Senate if he
failed to round his periods, to adorn his diction with the occasional
metaphor, to divide his speech according to rule and to end it with a
memorable flourish. If one wrote, as the Christians did, with a purpose, one
must also write for show, and their works bear a variety of titles which
bespeak a variety of styles and motives. Aristides (as we hear^) wrote an
Apology to Hadrian (c. 140 AD), Justin perhaps two Apologies to the
Antonines (c. 160), Athenagoras an Embassy to Marcus Antoninus (c. 170),
Tatian an Oration to the Greeks (who include the Romans, c. 170),
Theophilus a long treatise To Autolycus (c. 180), Clement of Alexandria a
Protrepticus (c. 190) and Tertullian an Apologeticus or Apologeticum to the
Roman magistrates (197), together with a treatise To the Nations. Tertullian
1 For a circumspect application of rhetorical categories to the Greek apologists see Young
(1999), 82-90.
2 Eusebius, Church History 4.3.3. Two versions of i\\Q Apology survive, one in Syriac and
one in Greek, together with further fragments of the Greek. The discrepancies are so grave that
one despairs of recreating the Greek original.
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XVI
CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
sowed a crop of neologisms - among them the noun Romanitas and the
titular usage of Apologeticus^ - in a style that defied the canons of Latinity;
hy contrast his fellow African Minucius Eelix essayed a dextrous imitation
of Ciceronian dialogue in his Octavius (?c. 170), which is adversarial hut not
forensic, and is plainly calculated not to appease but to beguile, and hence
convert, the learned ear.
By the third century, Christians felt secure enough and erudite enough to
address their harangues to intellectual critics rather than to their temporal
overlords. Origen’s eight books Against Celsus (7248), far exceeding the
work of any previous apologist in learning and prolixity, belong to the
category of remonstrations with the dead that had already amused the
orators and philosophers of the second century. Origen was surpassed in his
turn after fifty years by Eusebius, who maintained in his Preparation for the
Gospel (c. 310) that the best thoughts of the Greeks exposed the vanity of
idols and corroborated the teachings of the Church. Eusebius is the first
author to possess an inventory of the Greek apologists;^ at about the same
time the African Lactantius reviewed the labours of his countrymen with
ostentatious eloquence, not making any secret of his desire to outdo them in
the seven books of his Divine Institutes (c. 310).^ A portion of this work is
dedicated to the young Constantine, and, like the Preparation for the Gospel,
it does not contain any reference to a current persecution. The same is true of
Arnobius’ seven books Against the Nations (c. 295 or c. 325), which were
written not to blunt the sword of a magistrate but to prove to senior
churchmen that his conversion was sincere.'^ Apologetic had now become an
art that one might cultivate with no pretence of seeking a pagan audience -
a point that must be taken into account when one inquires into the date,
occasion, authorship and initial destination of the Oration to the Saints.
We must concede, for example, that the Oration is addressed to a Christ¬
ian audience at a time when persecution was remembered but not feared.
Nevertheless, so long as it shares the character of works that were composed
in a different era, the passing of the tyrants does not preclude the use of the
1 On the title see Price (1999), 115-16.
2 See Church History 4.3.1 (Quadratus), 4.3.3 (Aristides), 4.8.3 (Justin), 4.26.1 (Melito,
Apollinarius), 5.17.5 (Miltiades). The last three and Quadratus are only names to us. Frede
(1999), 227-28 observes that only petitions to the emperor are recognised by Eusebius as
apologies, a fact that explains the absence of Theophilus and Tatian, though not that of Melito.
See Frede (1999), 228 on references to Tertullian in the Church History.
3 See Divine Institutes 5.1, with the remarks of Edwards (1999a), 203-04.
4 Jerome, On Illustrious Men 80.
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INTRODUCTION
xvii
term ‘apologetic’. Again, the speaker purports to be an emperor who has
repealed the legislation against the Christians and tolerates only the
inconspicuous practice of pagan rites; it follows that the Christians no longer
had so much need of a protector, but not that Christianity no longer had any
need of an intellectual defence. Again we might imagine that a Christian
among Christians would not be required to vindicate his character; the
example of Arnobius corrects us, and even if the sovereign could not be
forced, he might think it expedient to include his own apology in an
apologetic exercise on behalf of his newborn faith. Finally, it is true that
when the pagans were in the ascendant, the majority of those who took up
the pen in the cause of Christendom were Greeks; we should not infer,
however, that the present speech is more likely to have been written in that
language, as the Latins become more prominent, and more verbose, in the
epoch when apologetic writing served primarily to embellish the reputation
of the Christian orator.
THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS: CONTENT, AUTHENTICITY
AND OCCASION
The Oration to the Saints appears as the fifth book' in Eusebius’ biograph¬
ical panegyric On the Life of Constantine. In the main body of this work he
alludes to the speech by a slightly different title:
The king therefore presented the written text of his words in the Roman
tongue, and the interpreters whose task it was translated it into the Greek
language. As a specimen of the translations, and so that no-one may imagine
that my testimony to his speeches is a boast, I shall append immediately after
the present work the one that he himself entitled “About the Assembly of the
Saints”, having dedicated this writing to the Church of God. {Life of
Constantine 4.32).
If all 26 chapters were recited on the original occasion, the speech will
have taken about two hours to deliver.^ The orator commences by declaring
that it is now the date of the Passion.^ After this his discourse falls into three
1 See the final sentence of the translation in this volume.
2 The following synopsis is borrowed, with slight changes, from Edwards (1999b), 253-54.
3 I would take this to mean Good Friday, against Hall (1998), 96, though I agree that such a
date would be incompatible with an allocution to an assembly composed of bishops, who would
be celebrating Easter in their own churches. As Barnes (2001), 34 now agrees, there is no reason
to assume that Constantine was addressing such an audience.
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xviii
parts. The first (Chapters 2-10) puts the case for monotheism; the pagan
gods, with their diverse births and characters, cannot maintain the concord
of the universe, and their immoralities prove that they are either living
demons or dead mortals. The notion that the world exists by chance is
indefensible, as an almighty and benevolent creator would be needed to
appease the eternal conflict of the elements. Plato had an inkling of the truth,
but no philosopher has understood how the sum of things is governed by the
Eather through the offices of his Son.
Next (in Chapters 11-19) he extols the voluntary abasement of the Son
in his incarnation. A god in human form, replete with virtue and inalienable
wisdom, Christ has opened up the path to heaven by his teaching. Having
manifested his philanthropy by his willingness to suffer, he imitates his
Eather’s magnanimity by waiving his revenge for a certain interval, during
which he enlightens every nation with the brilliance of his resurrected glory.
His life and vindication were foretold by the Hebrew prophets, but the most
persuasive arguments for pagans are a Sibylline acrostic which predicts the
Day of Judgment and the Eourth Eclogue of Virgil, which celebrates the
birth of an unnamed infant as the prelude to a returning age of gold.
Finally (Chapters 20-26) the speaker declares his personal adherence to
the Saviour. He apostrophizes Decius, Valerian and Aurelian, the three
persecuting emperors of the third century, and cites himself as a witness to
the calamitous effects of the great persecution initiated by his predecessor
Diocletian in 303. He claims that those successors of Diocletian who have
perished most ingloriously were those who had compounded their defiance
of the imperial constitution with the oppression of the Church. He ends with
the praise of Christ, whose wise and merciful dominion he will never cease
to acknowledge and proclaim.
Authenticity
Suspicion that the sermon is a forgery by Eusebius* is easily rebutted. First,
no intimate knowledge of its contents is suggested by his approximation to
the present title: what did he understand by an ‘Oration about the Assembly
of the Saints’? Second, no other work of his fluent pen reveals that he was
capable of quoting a line from Virgil, whose Fourth Eclogue is almost a
second scripture to our speaker. Third, the speech implies that pagan
sacrifice is lawful, while Eusebius is the one witness who expressly credits
1 Or even that he has tampered with it, as Davies (1991) contends.
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INTRODUCTION
XIX
Constantine with a general prohibition of such rites. Fourth, the speaker
intimates with regret that he was not raised in the knowledge of the true God;
Eusebius states that Constantine returned to the ‘religion of his father’ in
adopting monotheism. Finally, the theology of the Oration, as it is set out in
the tenth chapter, conceives the second person of the Trinity, lesus Christ, as
an emanation from the Godhead, the uttered speech or logos prophorikos of
the Father who issues from his immanent thought or logos endiathetos.
Eusebius rejected this analogy, which seemed to him to contradict the
scriptures and to compromise the indivisibility of God.*
Eusebius once excluded, the authorship could almost be awarded by
default to Constantine, but in addition the character of the speech itself tells
heavily in favour of his claim. As a forgery it could not have been published
in the emperor’s lifetime; if it were a showpiece, like the Apology for Socrates
by Libanius, to entertain a subsequent generation, we should not expect it to
ape the loud yet flaccid style of Constantine’s own letters and legislation.
Such an impersonation would be unparalleled, in Greek at least, except in
the case of figures such as Plato or Demosthenes, whose works continued to
be perused as literature. On this theory, therefore, the undistinguished Greek
of the Oration would imply that it was written with the purpose of deception,
and for an audience that remembered the ostensible author well enough to
recognise verisimilitude in the imitation of him. But since the piece does
nothing either to denigrate Constantine or to assist his hagiographers, the
motives of the hypothetical forger are impossible to divine.
It seems, moreover, obvious that the speech was intended for a Latin
audience; what orator would woo the Greeks with a commentary on Virgil,
while omitting all mention of their native poets The evidence for Greek
translation, let alone Greek exegesis, of Virgil before the accession of
Constantine is nugatory; as for the only specimen of Greek verse in the
oration, an acrostic from what is now the Eighth Sibylline oracle, that too
was better known to Latin authors, such as Augustine and Lactantius, than to
the Greek apologists. The purpose of adducing it is to show that a pagan
seeress had proclaimed the final judgment and identified the judge as ‘Jesus
Christ, Son of God, Saviour’; yet on the rare occasions when the Greeks
made use of Sibylline testimonia,^ the aim was not to lift the seal of history
1 For references and bibliography, see Edwards (1995), with Edwards (1999b), 260-61 on
the usage of the term logos.
2 Baldwin (1976) adduces the speech as evidence of a Greek translation of Virgil, but
observes that extant papyri of Greek translations date from the fourth to the sixth centuries.
3 See Justin, lApology 20.1 and 44.12; Athenagoras, Embassy 30.1.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
but to prove the timeless attributes of God. It is true that a recitation of the
lines in their original tongue would be difficult for western ears to follow;
but this is no objection, as the acrostic would almost certainly be lost on any
audience, Greek or Roman, at first hearing. If the full Greek text was
incorporated into the published Latin version of the speech, it will not have
been impenetrable, and may even have been familiar, to a readership whom
Lactantius had already plied with untranslated fragments of the poem.
Equally congenial to a western author and his western audience is the
theological tenor of the Oration. In the tenth chapter, part of the ecclesi¬
astical teaching on the Trinity is expressed in words purporting to be Plato’s,
though in fact they seem to originate with Numenius, a second-century
Platonist who was quarried by both Greek and Latin Christians of this
period.* Christ becomes, by analogy at least,^ a second God, subservient to
the Lather, and then, as we have seen, the logos prophorikos, the audible
word engendered in the intellect. Eusebius was not the only easterner who
disliked this interpretation of the term logos, as we meet it in the first verse
of John’s Gospel; Origen, the great scholar of the third century, had argued
in his commentary on this Gospel that if Christ were merely the Father’s
speech he would not possess the hypostasis, the determinate being, that is
proper to the Son of God.^ Nevertheless this had been the common tenet of
Greek and Latin Christianity up to Origen’s day; in the west, where it was
stamped by the authority of Tertullian,'* it survived with little change into the
reign of Constantine. In the east it held its own for a season in Alexandria,
but its principal exponent, Marcellus of Ancyra, was adjudged to be a heretic
at council after council, and punished by deposition from his bishopric. One
great prelate, however, gave him shelter and had the hardihood to pronounce
him orthodox - Bishop Julius of Rome.^
This dispute arose in the wake of the more notorious controversy that
takes its name from Arius. The question that now came before the Church
was whether Christ, like every being who was dependent on the Father,
should be numbered among his creatures, or whether his relation to the
Father was a unique one, which might be described as natural and defined as
1 See my notes to this chapter on Numenius, Chalcidius and Platonism.
2 And I would say indeed only by analogy, against Barnes (2001), 35. See further my
annotations to this paragraph in the speech.
3 Commentary on John 1.25-26. Cf. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 2.12.5 on the Valentinian
usage of the term ‘immanent’ (endiathetos).
4 Against Praxeos 5.
5 On Marcellus and Julius see now Kinzig and Vinzent (1999).
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INTRODUCTION
XXI
an identity of substance. The obstinacy of Arius, an Alexandrian presbyter
who upheld the first opinion, precipitated the council of Nicaea in 325. It did
not resolve the struggle, but it introduced the watchword homoousios
(‘consubstantiaT) into a creed that was later deemed to be ecumenical and
binding on the clergy. Historians have often tried to ascertain which side in
the war was taken by our orator. If he is convicted of an error, the inference
may be that he is more likely to be Constantine, since emperors (unlike
historians) cannot distinguish orthodoxy from heresy; conversely it may be
argued that a monarch who was out to rule the Empire in alliance with the
bishops would refrain from holding views that contradicted the prevalent
doctrine of the Church. Some claims to have detected a lapse are specious -
the Oration does indeed subordinate the Son to the Father, but not all
subordination is heretical; others are quite fallacious - to say that Christ was
born once from the Father and once from Mary is traditional and orthodox,
and was possibly unpalatable to Arius.^ In any case, deviations from the
temporary consensus at Nicaea have no bearing on the provenance, date or
purpose of this sermon if, as I suspect, it merely expounds the faith, as yet
untested and untroubled, that was taught to all neophytes in the Latin west.
Dogma is not the linchpin of our speaker’s case, as might be guessed
from his appeal to Plato. That is not to say that he has no interest in theology.
From time to time he apostrophizes dead or living pagans, and this gives to
his speech the familiar marks of an apology, a tract designed to exculpate the
Christians from the calumny and ridicule of outsiders. Accordingly his first,
most prominent topic after the preface is not the Trinity but the unity of the
Godhead - a platitude of course for all apologetic works and martyrologies,
but reinvigorated in the first quarter of the fourth century, when Lactantius,
Athanasius and our orator all buttressed it with an argument from the unity
of the world. If there were not one God, they ask in unison, who would
temper the harmony of the elements and prevent the world from falling into
ruin under the counterplay of forces? In this they had been anticipated, not
by earlier Christians but by Aristotle, who reinforced the lesson with
Homer’s maxim, ‘the rule of many is not good; let there be a single ruler’.^
In Homer this was the reasoning of a warrior, and the Church had little use
for it until it found a Christian at the summit of political authority. Our
speaker sees this perfectly when in the final chapter he declares himself the
servant of the Almighty, leaving us to infer that if the Almighty has appointed
1 See Edwards (1995).
2 Aristotle, Metaphysics 1076a, citing Iliad 2.204.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
only one servant (as he did in Jewish prophecy),' he will not leave even part
of his world to a second viceroy. This might be the position of an autocrat or
of one who shared his power but was an aspirant to autocratic rule; in either
case, we must admit that the author writes very pertinently in the character
of Constantine, if indeed he is not Constantine himself.
Once the speech is read as a manifesto of ambition, not merely a defence
of Christianity, we can put aside the objection that the scribbling of
apologies is no task for an emperor, as he has the power to countermand the
polemics and persecutions which inspired all previous writing of this nature.
On the contrary, while a forger would have no motive, this emperor would
have had almost too many for composing such a piece. Whether he was joint
ruler or sole ruler at the time of its delivery, he had to persuade this peaceable
congregation of his right to rule by conquest, and of God’s desire that the
Empire should be governed from an undivided throne. As a newborn layman,
who had previously condoned Diocletian’s measures against the Church, he
might wish to submit a personal confession of the kind that is exemplified in
his own lifetime by Arnobius’ seven books Against the Nations. As an
emperor, on the other hand, he had mastered a vein of bombast that had
almost become a literary genre in this epoch of royal loquacity, as every
sovereign strove to impress his own religious view on the preamble to an
edict for the enforcement or repeal of persecution. The result is what we
have before us - a tract in favour of theocratic monarchy, mimicking the
edicts of the tyrant Maximinus, which had urged that it was only ancestral
piety, with its many rites, that ensured continuing peace among the gods.^
Now that we have Eusebius, we can hardly miss the echo; in his own day,
who but Constantine would have noticed, let alone thought of it?
1 Isa. 42.1, 49.6, 52.13; but perhaps most relevant to Constantine is 45.1 (the elevation of
Cyrus).
2 The rescript to Tyre in 312, preserved by Eusebius, Church History 9.7.3-14 maintains
that the world is governed by the providence of gods whose power is attested by their works and
that the unity of all things is sustained by the hegemony of Zeus (9.7.3, 4 and 7). The existence
of these gods is undeniable to anyone of intelligence (9.7.8) and the city to which this letter is
directed has good reason to be sensible of their favours (9.7.3—4). The evidence of Eusebius is
confirmed by two inscriptions to other cities which are discussed by Mitchell (1988), 108-10;
as Corcoran (1996), 149-51 observes, the document is a rescript only in form, for the chorus of
identical petitions which it purports to answer can only have been concerted by the emperor.
Although the resultant text evinces so many similarities to Constantine’s oration, I am not aware
of anyone who maintains that Maximinus was too shallow or too unlettered to have drafted it
himself.
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INTRODUCTION
xxiii
The occasion
Any rhetorical exercise purports to be directed to a certain occasion and a
certain audience. Sometimes this profession is fictitious and it is frequently
the case that the original circumstances are obscured in the preparation of a
publishable text. Nevertheless, in the absence of any countervailing evidence,
it is reasonable to suppose that the Oration was intended for delivery, though
perhaps in a shorter version that would not outstrip the patience and erudi¬
tion of the listeners. If after all it is spurious, we must assume that the one who
forged the contents with such industry would have taken pains to counterfeit
a plausible situation. Inquiries into the date and destination of the speech
have drained more pens than the question of authorship, from which of
course they cannot be divorced.
As an illustration of the last point we may take the argument pressed by
Richard Hanson against the ascription of the speech to Constantine.' Like
many other scholars he chooses Antioch as a setting, and he finds that he can
thus make sense of the otherwise gratuitous mention of Daphne, a maiden
who was turned into a laurel tree to save her from being ravished by Apollo.
Daphne was the name of Apollo’s sanctuary near Antioch; in the time of
Emperor Julian it was occupied by the bones of the martyr Babylas and the
miraculous frustration of the Apostate’s attempt to profane the relics was
remembered as one of the great humiliations of his lamentable reign. Thus
the allusion ceases to appear trifling, and virginity is no longer the only
reason for the juxtaposition of Daphne and the Sibyl; unfortunately the light
that history sheds upon this passage discloses also that its author must have
lived at least a generation after Constantine. A single sally therefore
threatens to bear both date and authorship away from the conservatives. In
reply they could skirmish with the plea that readers of Ovid would recall
Daphne as the first victim of Apollo, and that her name would thus suffice to
furnish Constantine with a pretext for his defection from that god to a nobler
patron.^ It would, however, be a better strategy to argue that large questions
are not decided by a paragraph, and that this one can be fought to an issue
only on the broad ground that is offered by the whole body of the speech.
It is in two chapters, the twenty-second and the twenty-fifth, that we
come upon historical ‘facts’, if such a name can be given to the invidious
reminiscences of two dead men, both emperors and persecutors of recent
1 Hanson (1973).
2 See my notes to Chapter 18.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
notoriety, whom the speaker does not feel that he needs to name. One, who
held the reins in his ‘dearest city’, had seduced many with his promises -
though not, it seems, the Christians, who had greeted the conqueror’s advent
with an immediate and spontaneous demonstration. The other had succeeded
Diocletian in the command of the Roman army, until God had punished the
vices of both leaders with the destruction of their troops.^ Once these figures
have been identified, we shall have a terminus post quern for the Oration,
and some notion of the purposed time and place of its delivery. A span of
barely fifteen years lies open to conjecture, but one so dense with usurpa¬
tions, wars, alliances, conquests and auspicious deaths that half a dozen
opinions could be espoused, and not all scholars have avoided serial
marriages.
The flock of names decreases with the years.^ Galerius, the ruler of the
east and senior figure in a college of five emperors, expired in 311 after
revoking the persecution that he and Diocletian had commenced in 303. To
his signature on this palinode were added those of Licinius, nominal
emperor or Augustus of the west since 308, and of Constantine, who in 306
had illegally proclaimed himself the heir to his father Constantins and since
then had remained the actual suzerain of Gaul and Britain. The edict of
repeal^ does not contain the name of Maximinus, an unrepentant persecutor
who would have been the legitimate successor to Galerius in the east had he
not tried to forestall his rivals by a premature coronation in 310. Also
missing, and probably not solicited, is the signature of Maxentius, son of the
former emperor Maximian, who had been since 306 the ruler, or tyrant as
others styled him, of Italy and Africa. After the death of Galerius, Licinius
turned his arms against Maximinus, while Constantine advanced upon
Maxentius in Rome. In 312 Maxentius died at the battle of the Milvian
1 The assertion of Barnes (2001), 28 that this figure can be no other than Licinius depends
on the unjustified assumption that the ‘good-for-nothing’ was overcome by Constantine
himself. In proposing Nicomedia in 321 as the theatre for this oration, Barnes does not
anticipate my arguments here, and his newest theory is vulnerable to all the same objections that
I advance against Piganiol, Lane Fox and the earlier thoughts of Barnes himself.
2 The principal sources for the following summary are the Latin panegyrics, Lactantius, Ofi
the Deaths of the Persecutors, Eusebius, Church History 8-10 and Eusebius, Constantine 1.
Apart from the exact dates and the motives of the agents, little is disputed, and Barnes (1981),
3-80 remains an excellent essay in the creation of continuous narrative from polemical
fragments.
3 Though the Latin text of the so-called palinode is given at Lactantius, Pers. 34, the names
of the signatories appear only at Eusebius, Church History 8.17.
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INTRODUCTION
XXV
Bridge, on the eve of which it is said that Constantine became a Christian.'
In 313 Maximinus succumbed to Licinius, and the Empire was then peace¬
ably if not amicably divided between the latter and Constantine. Constantine
snatched Serdica from Licinius in 316 under pretext of defending Roman
territory from invasion. War broke out in earnest in 321, and Licinius
enacted stringent laws against the Christians. In 324 he was driven from his
capital and after his suicide in 325 the Roman Empire, for the first time in
over forty years, became the property of a single man.
Can these names be matched with the anonymous intimations of the
speech? If we take Galerius as the tyrant who had seduced the ‘dearest city’,
it is most likely to be Serdica, the place of his death, and the date would
perhaps be 316, in the aftermath of Constantine’s occupation, or (as Barnes
suggested later) 321,^ when new hostilities made it profitable to rouse old
memories of the persecution. The unworthy captain of Diocletian’s host
would be Maximinus, for only he could be said to have inherited the soldiery
of the east. If, instead of naming the tyrant first we endeavour to locate the
city, Antioch has been the most favoured choice,^ as a metropolis whose
wealth would make it dear to any emperor, and whose diligent support of
Maximinus up to 313 entailed that it would not be gained without copious
flattery for a Christian ruler. The difficulty is that if Maximinus is now iden¬
tified as the tyrant of the dearest city, the general who mislaid Diocletian’s
army must be his conqueror Licinius, whose fall in 324 is thus being
juxtaposed with that of Maximinus in 313. Advocates of this theory have
proposed that the Oration was delivered at the Council of Antioch in 325,
though records of this meeting are both scanty and uncertain, while no report
of Constantine’s attendance is preserved.''
Nicomedia, Diocletian’s former seat and the capital of Bithynia, has
been favoured in recent years by Barnes and Bleckmann, the former dating
1 Lactantius, Pers. 44.5. Eusebius, Constantine 1.28 does not give a location or date for the
vision, which differs in some details from the one made famous by the Latin author. Lactantius
is supported by Philostorgius, Church History 1.7 and Gelasius, Church History 1.3^, but not,
according to Elliott (1992), by Constantine’s own utterances, which imply that even his western
conquests were undertaken at the behest of God. It is possible that Constantine means that he
did God’s work without knowing it, just as Cyrus of Persia never heard the prophet saluting him
as the servant of the lord at Isa. 45.1.
2 See Barnes (1976a) and (1981), 323.
3 De Decker (1978), 85; Lane Fox (1986); Hanson (1973), though contesting the
authenticity of the work.
4 For the evidence relating to the council see Chadwick (1958).
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
it to 321 and the latter to 327.* Others advance an argument for Byzantium,
the last stronghold of Licinius and the future seat of the Constantinian
government;^ by a parallel reading, on his own premisses, of passages in the
Oration and in Lactantius, Piganiol arrives at a date between 321 and 324,
and opts for Thessalonica in 323, inferring the presence of Constantine at
Easter from the Theodosian Code.^ The authors who advance these theories
tend to rest the whole argument on one or two particulars, offering neither a
comprehensive analysis of the speech nor a satisfactory account of the
occasion. By contrast, Harold Drake’s study of the question is distinguished
by its rigorous interrogation of everything in the text that might be redolent
of past events or present circumstances.'* His argument alights at Rome,
which I also believe to have been at least the intended theatre for the emperor’s
performance. If I am right to think that each of the following points lends
weight to this hypothesis, or at least dispels an objection to it, the cumulative
probability must be reckoned very strong:
1. If Constantine composed the Oration it must have been in Latin, since
Eusebius, who neglects no opportunity to flatter him, reveals that he had no
competence in the formal use of any other tongue.^ Those who contest this
inference have argued that the speaker’s exegesis of the Eourth Eclogue is at
odds with the Latin text and presupposes his own Greek rendering of it.
These arguments have been met, and even if they were stronger they would
surely be outweighed by the consideration that only a Latin audience would
defer to a Latin poet. I have argued in my notes® that we can always trace
the comments to the Latin, and that the worst of the misquotations could
have been committed only by a person who knew tracts of Virgil’s poetry by
heart.
1 See Bleckmann (1997), Bames (2001), with Eusebius, Constantine 3.50 on Constantine’s
donations to the city. None the less there is no proof that he professed such an affection for that
city as he claims to feel in the present speech, and he never occupied it as his capital.
2 See especially Mazzarino (1974).
3 Piganiol (1932).
4 Drake (1985b). While this article seems to me to imply an early date at least for the kernel
of the speech, neither in this discussion nor at (2000), 292-305 will Drake consent to fix the
occasion, and at (2000), 294 he suggests that ‘the most important characteristic of this speech
may be its timelessness’. No doubt; and the same or more could be said of almost any work by
Cicero, St Paul or Edmund Burke, but that does not mean that they do not have a date.
5 Constantine 4.32, on which see Edwards (1999b), 255.
6 See Chapter 19, with Edwards (1999b), 259.
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INTRODUCTION
XXVll
2. All claims to have discerned an Arian tenor in the speech are, as I have
shown above, ill-founded; the probity of Eusebius as an editor, on the other
hand, is proved by his having left intact some passages that contradict his
own more studied and more precarious teachings. The theory that Lactantius
was the author is now discarded, but the numerous parallels that can be
adduced between his writings and the speech do at least illuminate the source
of its theology, which (as I have explained above) is simply the orthodoxy of
the west.
3. The city addressed is one for which the speaker has a special and (as he
seems to think) notorious affection.^ No doubt he had strong feelings for
Jerusalem, the Holy City, for Serdica, his ‘second Rome’, for Byzantium,
the site of his future capital, and even perhaps for Antioch, the metropolis of
the Orient; but none of this is said to have aroused in him the compassionate
indignation which, according to his panegyrists, was the sole reason for his
march on Rome. Even Eusebius, careless and laconic as he is on western
matters, has a long account of Constantine’s celebration of this conquest. He
testifies at the same time to a popular demonstration in his favour, very like
the one that our orator attributes to his audience and the panegyrists of
Constantine to all the Italian cities, but especially to Rome.
4. Eusebius adds that Constantine cemented his enthronement in the capital
by parading a splendid figure of the Cross.^ According to Lactantius, this
symbol had been the army’s sign of victory in the battle for the city; what
subsequent occasion is more likely to have prompted the addition of a stanza
spelling out the Greek word Stauros (Cross) to the Sibylline acrostic which
dominates the centre of this speech?
5. Whatever the name of Daphne meant to Constantine, his sibyl is not the
mouthpiece of a small shrine close to Antioch. To him she is at all times the
Cumaean prophetess who inspired the Eourth Eclogue, and even when he is
quoting lines attributed to the Sibyl of Erythrae, he tells us on the authority
of Cicero that she made her home in Italy. This would be frigid learning in a
Greek author, and a patriotic commonplace in a Latin one; to Constantine it
was also a stroke of policy, for the Sibylline Books, acquired eight hundred
years ago by Rome’s last king, were frequently consulted by the Senate, and
had been opened for the last time by Maxentius on the eve of his fatal battle.
1 See my notes to Chapters 22 and 25.
2 Eusebius, Constantine 1.40.2.
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xxviii
Rather than inform the resentful pagans of the city that their oracle was
mistaken, Constantine more prudently invites them to conclude that she was
on the Christian side.
6. The name of Rome appears within a few lines of the emperor’s compli¬
ment to his ‘dearest city’. I take this as evidence in favour of a Roman venue
rather than, as others would, against it. Constantine had no reason to dilute
an encomium of a proud Greek city with a reference to another which at that
time would almost certainly have been reckoned its superior; nor would the
unification of the east under his sway have been promoted by the admission
that at one time he had not enjoyed the undivided loyalty of Rome. To say
this in Rome was only to tell the audience what it knew already, possibly
with an undertone of menace or reproach. As for the inelegance of attaching
first a sobriquet then a name to a single subject in the same paragraph, I have
pointed out elsewhere that a Gallic orator did not think it so artless.' And
there is purpose in the variation: the blandishments are reserved for those
who have lent support to Constantine, while the malcontents are neither led
nor driven, but simply nudged into a colourless aside.
7. The tyrant of Chapter 22 will be Maximinus if the scene is Antioch, and
Maxentius if it is Rome. In the former case the date of the speech is 325; in
the latter any date after 312 can be maintained. While the people of Antioch
would have little chance of deciphering an allusion to Maximinus twelve
years after his death and the intervening downfall of Licinius, the Oration
could have been designed for Rome without any fear that time and
circumstance would have dimmed the notoriety of Maxentius. A delivery
long after the event would be conceivable, for the panegyrics on Constantine
assisted recollection and at any date the presence of the conqueror in Rome
would have been a catalyst to memory. But, though so much may be said for
the sake of argument, it is obvious that the speech would have been still less
of an enigma to its audience if the occasion were so early, and the events of
which it reminded them so recent, that there had been no opportunity to
forget.^
1 Edwards (1999b), 266, citing LP 10(2)1.1 and 2.1.
2 Baynes (1931), 56, opining that Licinius is not the object of either of these allusions,
concludes that the speech would not have been delivered by Constantine after 323. He suspects
in any case that much of it is inauthentic.
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INTRODUCTION
XXIX
8. The general who wasted Diocletian’s army in Chapter 25 had allies in the
city that the speaker is now addressing. Galerius, Maxentius, Maximinus
and Licinius died successively in the space of fourteen years from 311 to
325. To make such a glancing reference to any of them more than a few
months after his death would surely have imposed too great a tax upon the
memory of an audience. The fallen despot cannot he Maxentius, who
commanded armies only in the west, nor Licinius, who did not inherit
Diocletian’s troops except hy conquest. He must therefore be either Galerius
or Maximinus; but if he is Galerius, who died in 311, the Oration must have
been composed before his evil destiny had been eclipsed by the downfall of
Maxentius in 312 and of Maximinus in 313. Rome is the only city of note
that fell to Constantine within this period; and if the allusion is to Maximinus,
Rome again is the only city that claimed the favour of Constantine while the
memory of that villain was still green. The chapter heading states that
Maximinus is the man denounced by Constantine; and shortly after Con¬
stantine entered Rome his skilful archivists were able to show the Christians
that Maxentius had contracted an alliance with this notorious persecutor.
The speech would make the best use of these facts if it was written in the
wake of Licinius’ victory over Maximinus in 313 and delivered to former
subjects of Maxentius in Rome.
The early date implied by setting the speech in Rome may also be a clue
to its immediate occasion. Having taken the city in 312, Constantine could
never have been present there at Easter after 315, for in 316 he abandoned it
for Serdica and after 324 he took up residence in the east. Even had he
returned to Rome, he could not have convinced the inhabitants that it was
still his ‘dearest city’. Now in 313 a council of Italian and Gallic bishops
under Roman guidance had condemned the incipient schism of the Donatists
in Africa; the controversy raged on until the emperor, who had hoped that the
Roman verdict would prevail, was forced to convene another session at Arles
in Gaul in the summer of 314. In the Eastertide of the following year^ we
may imagine that there was discontent in Rome as well as Africa, yet Easter,
as the letters of the Donatists seldom failed to urge, was a time when
brethren ought to make their peace. The paschal season will have been a time
to remind all Christians, and especially the saints in Rome, of the unity that
God ordained for his Empire and his Church.
1 I choose 315 in preference to 314 because the itinerary of Constantine in the latter year
does not allow for a visit to the capital at Easter: see Barnes (1982). Of course we cannot rule
out the possibility that the speech was delivered by a surrogate.
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XXX
CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
HELENA, JERUSALEM AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE CROSS
Great men grow in stature as they recede in time, and the triumph of
Christianity surrounded Constantine with a penumhra of vivid legend,
wholesome anecdote and tendentious fahrication.' He was already a second
Christ to Eusebius, who seems conscious that his report of the conversion,
though attested by the emperor himself, is not the common one, and has
been suspected by some modern historians of embellishing the humble
termination of the reign.^ Every continuator of Eusebius thought it necessary
to write the story of Constantine afresh, and even a pagan found it in his
heart to write a posthumous encomium;^ but the rudiments of later panegyric
had already been sketched by Constantine before he found a friend to record
his life. While he was still a pagan he announced through his panegyrists that
he was not a mere adventurer but the pious favourite of immortal masters; as
a Christian he gave free rein to his ostentatious passion for the patronage and
creation of sacred sites. The Oration to the Saints contains one reference to
the cult of martyrs, two to the display of martial trophies^ - firstfruits of a
new age of ecclesiastical pomp, in which the clergy, though not ready to
condone the use of images, united with the sovereign in promoting the
veneration of sites and relics.^
In Judaea, according to Eusebius, he decorated the tomb of Christ and
built a ‘royal temple’ to overlook the adjacent precinct.® Yet his projects in
the Holy Land were eclipsed by those of Helena, his mother, who is
canonized by Eusebius in the third book of his Life of Constantine. She was,
he tells us, adored throughout the world for a combination of munificence
and modesty; she was gracious to prisoners, liberal to soldiers, rich in pious
works. Her enterprises included a church at Bethlehem and the Church of
the Ascension in Jerusalem.’ Little more is said of her by Eusebius, except
1 The flowering of these legends in Byzantium can be studied in Kazhdan (1987).
2 According to Constantine 3.64, Constantine died at Pentecost in his capital. Woods
(1997), however, argues from other sources that he died in a wayside hostel and was thus
prevented from canying on a projected wai‘ against the Persians.
3 On Praxagoras see Lieu and Montserrat (1996), 7-8.
4 See Chapter 11 (p. 22 n. 1), 12 (p. 28 n. 8), 22 (p. 53 n. 8).
5 See Grigg (1977) on the ‘cult without images’.
6 Eusebius, Constantine 3.36.1: for recent commentary see Cameron and Hall (1999), 287—
91.
7 Eusebius, Constantine 3.44^7. Cameron and Hall (1999) note that Eusebius ignores her
humble origin (attested by Ambrose, On the Death of Theodosius 42); they also record the
dubious tradition that her birthplace was Drepanum.
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INTRODUCTION
XXXI
that she was ushered into heaven at the age of eighty, already a companion of
the angels. Perhaps there was little more to know, and consequently her life
was even more hospitable to pious fiction than her son’s. Pagan friends of
Constantine affirm that she was the first wife of Constantins, raised up from
low estate and soon discarded; his foes say that she was never more than the
mistress of Constantins and do not forget to sneer. ^ Theodoret, in the fifth
century, relates that she brought up Constantine as a Christian, but this claim
is rebutted by the emperor’s testimony^ and by the circumambulation of
Eusebius: ‘So far had he made her Godfearing, though she had not been such
before, that she seemed to have been a disciple of the common Saviour from
the first’ The date of 315 which is allotted to her conversion in a late Greek
source would be implausible even if it were not accompanied by a fantastic
legend, in which Helena tries to wean her son from Christianity to Judaism,
but then becomes a Christian herself after a contest in which Pope Silvester
betters the miracles of a dozen rabbis.^^ The dates offered by the two accounts
translated in this volume are, if anything, still less credible, but these texts
are chosen for their antiquity, not for their verisimilitude. They mark the first
appearance of two factors which remain constant in every narrative of
Helena’s conversion: it follows that of Constantine and culminates in that
miracle of ancient archaeology, the discovery (or as the Latin says, the
invention) of the True Cross.
This relic first became a public trophy in the last quarter of the fourth
century, when the bishopric of Jerusalem, hitherto as weak as it was ancient,
was beginning to displace its northern neighbour Caesarea as the centre of
Christianity in Palestine. After the Nicene council of 325, which made it
second to Caesarea, it soon acquired the patriarchal status that was other¬
wise accorded only to Antioch, Rome and Alexandria.^ As it became in
consequence a favourite goal of pilgrimage, new rituals took shape to excite
the awe and generosity of the visitors. Judaea had been the cradle of
Christianity, and not even Rome, where Peter and Paul were buried, could
1 See Origin of Constantine 2 at Lieu and Montserrat (1996), 43 against Zosimus, New
History 2.8; the Byzantine epitomator Zonaras, Annals 13.1.4 cannot decide.
2 See p. 20 n. 2 to Oration 11, against Theodoret, Church Histoiy 1.18.
3 Eusebius, Constantine 3.47.2, translated by Cameron and Hall (1999), 139, with notes at
295.
4 See Lieu and MontseiTat (1996), 28, quoting Zonaras, George Syncellus and the so-called
Opitz-Vita.
5 See Bright (1882), 22-24 on the canons of Nicaea (325), Chalcedon (451) and Nicaea II
(787).
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
vie with it in the number and antiquity of its monuments. Least of all could
Rome display an heirloom like the one that bewitched the eyes of credulous
travellers to Jerusalem at Eastertide in the late fourth century:
The bishop’s chair is placed on Golgotha Behind the Cross (the cross there
now), and he takes his seat. A table is placed before him with a cloth on it,
the deacons stand around, and there is brought to him a gold and silver box
containing the holy Wood of the Cross. It is opened and the Wood of the
Cross and the title are taken out and placed on the table. As long as the holy
Wood is on the table, the bishop sits with his hands resting on either end of
it, and holds it down, and the deacons round him keep watch over it... [A] 11
the people, catechumens as well as faithful, come up one by one to the table.
They stoop down over it, kiss the Wood and move on.'
The spectacle that Egeria witnessed might have been created for her
benefit, so far as earlier records go: the silence of the Bordeaux pilgrim, as
Gibbon notes in a famous aphorism, ‘satisfies those who think’, while it
‘perplexes those who believe’.^ It is possible, however, that the sceptical
historian places too much faith in the candour of his sources. Even one who
had seen the Cross might choose to say nothing of it if he feared that the
ceremony was idolatrous, or if, being loyal to another see, he did not wish to
acknowledge that Jerusalem had a claim upon the holiest altar in the
Christian world. Both motives would be present, for example, in the writings
of the historian Eusebius. He was bishop of Caesarea, which, as he proudly
boasts, was also the home of the great theologian Origen and the martyr
Pamphilus; like these predecessors he was a resolute iconoclast, regarding
images of both gods and emperors as mere stones. It is possible that his
silence belies his knowledge of the Cross; in view of the habitual
incongruity between the texts that he cites and the deductions that he makes
from them, it is possible too, as Harold Drake maintains, that he quotes a
document which obliquely records the finding of the Cross in the excavation
of the Holy Sepulchre. It is clear at least, on the evidence in Eusebius, that
the ground was well dug up beside the city, and that the emperor announced
the exhumation or erection of an artefact to which he gave the name tropaia
1 Pilgrimage of Egeria 37.1-2, trans. Wilkinson (1971), 136-37. On p. 3 Wilkinson dates
the pilgrimage to the years between 381 and 384.
2 Gibbon (1929), II, 481 n.66; though on behalf of credulity one could urge that the pilgrim
wrote in 333, while the church was completed only in 335. His work is translated by Wilkinson
(1971), 153-63.
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INTRODUCTION
xxxiii
(spoils or trophy).* Drake’s inference that this was the Cross is tenuous and
disputed; perhaps it gains a little strength from the presence of other tenden¬
tious errors in Eusehius,^ hut how much weight does it lend to the tradition
that attributes the discovery of the trophy to the mother of Constantine?
We might be less inclined to suspect that Helena’s deed is fabulous were
it not for the contemporaneous growth of another tale about the Cross, in
which the heroine, Protonike, is patently fictitious.^ As her legend now
survives in Syriac and Armenian, Protonike is the wife of Emperor Claudius
and a convert to the new faith. She excavates the Cross as an act of piety, but
the Church has little time to display the trophy, as it is buried once more by
Trajan and its site concealed by a temple of Aphrodite. This sequence of
events would have a little more verisimilitude if Protonike were the consort
not of Claudius but of Domitian, who died only two years before Trajan
assumed the purple. And indeed there are traditions which allege that his
persecution of the Church had been inspired by the discovery that his wife
had an inclination to Christianity, and that he himself had interrogated the
grandchildren of Jude, the brother of Christ.'*
THE FINDING (OR INVENTION) OF THE TRUE CROSS
The two accounts of Helena’s feat translated here are variants of the same
narrative. Its wide dissemination in the ancient world is attested by the
survival of two later and less barbarous Latin versions, together with a
Syriac redaction which has recently been translated into English with a
commentary by Han Drijvers and Jan Willem Drijvers.^ The contest of
priority between these texts is not easily determined, but Borgehammar
1 Drake (1985a), citing Constantine 3.34 at 93.18-20 Heikel. Elsewhere in Constantine, the
term tropaia often denotes the Cross, though only in the singular: 21.16, 22.25, 76.12, 78.7 etc.
The use of this term to signify the Cross dates back at least to Justin Martyr, 1 Apology 55.1.
2 E.g. his use of the appellation ‘Church of the Holy Sepulchre’, on which see
Borgehammar (1991), 103-04. See also Stemberger (2000), 54-64 on the tendentiousness of
Eusebius, especially his suppression of Macarius, whose name appears only in Constantine’s
letter at Constantine 3.31.
3 With Heid (1992), I incline to regal'd the legend as in origin independent of that of Helena,
though its present form has certainty been shaped by a desire to outdo the version that was most
current in Greek and Latin.
4 Eusebius, Church History 3.19. I feel that this hypothesis gains some strength from the
fact that Judas is the name of the last Jewish bishop of Jerusalem, who died in the time of
Hadrian, at Eusebius, Church History 4.5.4.
5 Father and son: Drijvers and Drijvers (1997).
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XXXIV
CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
argues that the Syriac must be dependent on the Latin.' In both, the story of
Helena is prefaced by a fanciful narrative of her son’s conversion; the Syriac,
however, lacks the evidence of suture which can still be seen in the Latin.
This, to judge by the rubric at the beginning, is a record of the Adventus
Sanctae Crucis, the advent of the Holy Cross; but the subject indicated by
the corresponding sentence at the end is not an adventus but an inventio or
discovery, and this is also what we read in the title of the Greek text, which
does not recount but presupposes Constantine’s profession of belief. It is
probable therefore that a composite document, created first in Latin, was
translated into Syriac - though not without variations, as I indicate in my
notes - while the Greek account remained uncontaminated. Is the Greek or
the Latin then the earlier redaction of the Inventiol Answering in favour of
the former, Borgehammar^ has noted several places where the Latin has the
air of a translation, the most notable being those where it has adopted a
grammatical construction that would be more at home in Greek.
The outline of the tale in all three languages is as follows. The empress
Helena, moved by her son’s conversion and the Holy Spirit, makes her way
to Jerusalem in search of the Holy Cross. Her plan is to interrogate the
remnant of the Jewish population, but though they obey her summons, she
fails to overcome a preconcerted vow of silence. She dismisses them with
menaces, and they hold a second conference. One of their number, Judas,
reveals that he knows the secret, which was entrusted to his father by his
grandfather, a witness to both the crucifixion and Stephen’s martyrdom. On
no account, he says, is the queen to learn it; but under duress his countrymen
surrender him to Helena, and after a week’s imprisonment without rations he
confesses that he knows where the Cross is buried. He is taken to the site and
intones a prayer that is half a spell. Three crosses come to light, along with
a loose inscription that had formerly identified one as that of ‘Jesus of
Nazareth, King of the Jews’. Helena is at a loss, but when providence sends
a corpse to them, Judas promises that the True Cross will disclose itself by a
miracle; each cross is applied in turn to the dead man, and the third brings
him to life. Helena is now prompted by the Spirit to seek the nails of the
crucifixion. These, once found, are used by Constantine to adorn the bridle
of his horse, and thus fulfil the prophecy of Zechariah 14.20: ‘On that day
1 Borgehammar (1991), 246^8, though his arguments are not identical with those that I
advance in the present pai'agraph.
2 Borgehammar (1991), 237-39. I have commented on the most important of these infeli¬
cities in my annotations.
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INTRODUCTION
XXXV
there shall be upon the bells of the horses, Holiness unto the Lord’. The
Cross is laid in a silver chest by Helena, and Judas, now converted under the
name of Kyriakos or the Lord’s man, is appointed as bishop in the sanctuary.
(No reference is made to Macarius, bishop of Jerusalem in Helena’s time,
though the elevation of Kyriakos is sanctioned anachronistically by ‘Eusebius
of Rome’). Helena dies soon after, but not before she has instituted a day on
which all Christians are to commemorate her finding of the Cross.
This is the common matter of three narratives, none of which is truly
primitive. For one thing, none of them is a strict translation of another: the
Syriac revises the chronology of the Latin, and the obvious ineptitude of the
Latin author cannot account for all his aberrations from the Greek. One
riddle, which has not yet found a solution, is that in every version only two
generations are supposed to have elapsed between the death of Christ and
Helena’s excursion to Jerusalem. Perhaps the best explanation is that the tale
has been confused with one in which the archaeologist is the wife of a
previous emperor - perhaps, as I suggested above, the unfortunate wife of
Domitian. In the story of Protonike, the Jews oppose the recovery of the
Cross, and their rebellion under Hadrian and the irrevocable diaspora that
followed would suggest themselves to any Christian reader as an edifying
pendant. The punishment of the Jews at the conclusion of the Inventio is an
echo of the same calamity. At the same time it may allude to the annual feast
of Purim, when the Jews gave thanks for the massacre of the Gentiles that
was commemorated in the book of Esther; in the fourth century it was
believed that they were mocking Christ by fashioning a gallows for an effigy
of their enemy Hamann. Such a reminiscence would not have gone unnoticed
in the age of Constantine, when Jews began to suffer under Christian
supremacy. Constantine himself passed florid laws against voluntary and
involuntary apostasy from the Church to Judaism, adopting for the first time
in the history of Roman legislation against this people a tone that was not
merely restrictive but polemical.' The Nicene council of 325 imposed a
Christian patriarch on Judaea in opposition to the Jewish one^ and while
Eusebius taught that God had revoked his ancient covenant by permitting the
1 See Theodosian Code 16.8.1 and 16.8.5 against the punishment of apostates from
Judaism; Code 16.8.22 and Sirmondian Constitution 4 on the enfranchisement of Christian
slaves who were forcibly circumcised by Jews. Although Stemberger (2000), 43^7 argues that
the laws are less inclement than is generally supposed, the rhetoric is colourfully vindictive, and
Christians of the fourth century not only took up the rhetoric but mamed it to action.
2 Though, as Stemberger (2000), 238-39 shows, the Jewish patriarchate enjoyed legal
privileges from the reign of Constantine.
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XXXVl
CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
destruction of the temple, Helena’s buildings raised the Church to a visible
altitude above its ruins. The Inventio, which portrays the Jews as leaderless
malignants, is the voice of the Church triumphant and vindictive, its ambitions
fanned by the Christian occupation of the throne.
Some time before the Inventio reached its present form, hostilities had
been inflamed by Emperor Julian’s plan to restore the Temple in 363. An
earthquake and untimely death forestalled him, but self-aggrandisement at
the expense of Israel now appeared as a sacred duty to the bishopric of
Jerusalem. Not content with seeking out the bones of Stephen, the first of the
Gentile martyrs,' it added Kyriakos, an imaginary convert from the Jews, to
its list of bishops. He worked his share of miracles,^ but his name does not
appear in the earliest claims to the possession of the Cross. Of this we hear
first in the Catechetical Homilies of Cyril of Jerusalem; his boasts were
quickly followed by the salutations of bishops in other Greek cities -
Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom of Antioch and Cyril of Alexandria. Eor
our first account of the discovery, however, we are indebted to a Latin
prelate, Ambrose of Milan.^ Writing an obituary of Emperor Theodosius I in
395, he says in a concise and allusive paragraph that Helena had excavated
the hill of Golgotha, found there crosses lying in confusion and recognized
that of the Saviour by its titulus or rubric, ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the
Jews’. He hastens to admonish us that she worshipped the king and not the
wood itself - a sign that the Cross was famous enough to have become an
object of superstition. He adds that she ‘illuminated the Cross’ {crucein
refulsit) - a statement that could be understood only by those already
acquainted with the legend - and that the Spirit moved her a second time to
seek the nails with which Christ had been fastened to his gallows. Once
found, these were inlaid in a crown {diadema) and presented with a rein
ifrenum) to Constantine; both these gifts he bequeathed to his successors with
his faith.
Only a little later than this passage, and apparently independent of it, is
one in the Ecclesiastical History of Rufinus, which relates that a statue of
Venus (the Latin name for Aphrodite, goddess of love) had usurped the site
and was taken away before the relics were disinterred."' His account is also
1 See Van Esbroek (1984), with Bradbury (1996).
2 See Luigi (1904, 1906) and Pegoulewsky (1921).
3 On the Death of Theodosius A'i—Al.
4 Rufinus, Church History 10.7-8. According to Jerome, Letter 58.3, there were two
effigies, one of Jove and one of Venus. The original information comes directly from Lusebius,
Constantine 3.26, but there the site is Heliopolis.
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INTRODUCTION
XXXVll
embellished by a miracle: the titulus in this version has become detached,
and the bishop of Jerusalem, Macarius, advises the queen to test the power
of each of the crosses in turn upon a paralytic woman who has been brought
to them at that moment on a bier. When the third proves efficacious it is
acknowledged as the True Cross; Helena builds a ‘temple’ as an act of
thanks, and encloses the Cross itself in a silver chest. The nails (which seem
to be part of the same discovery) are used by Constantine as decorations for
his helmet and the bridle of his warhorse. In Paulinus of Nola,^ who already
speaks of a ‘story of the Cross’ (Jiistoria crucis), the chest is kept in
Helena’s church, which now acquires gold trappings, and the relic is
exhibited once a year, as the prerogative of the bishop, to those who gather
in the city on Good Friday. Paulinus, who says nothing of Macarius, appears
to have been the first to state that Helena gleaned her knowledge from ‘the
most learned of the Jews’. Since Ambrose, Rufinus and Paulinus are near¬
contemporaries, they are witnesses to the currency of the legend in the west
in the late fourth century, but cannot help us to plot successive phases in its
growth. As men of letters they must be given credit for the invention and
idiosyncrasy which even Christian palates now demanded as condiments to
a twice-told tale.
The Greek ecclesiastical historians - Theodoret, Socrates, Sozomen^ -
form a junction with Eusebius by turning the statue into a pagan temple, the
removal of which makes way for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Some
argue that they offer us better history - or at least a better history of
imposture - than Eusebius, whose tongue (it is alleged) was tied by jealousy
once Macarius of Jerusalem had become his rival in Palestine and his
opponent at Nicaea.^ Be that as it may, they possess traditions that were
almost certainly unknown to him. Sozomen has heard of a certain ‘Jew
living in the east’, who ascertained the location of the Cross from ‘paternal
records’. The story that the Cross had revived a dead man he reports with
circumspection, but he follows Socrates in applying Zechariah 14.20 to
1 Epistle 31 to Severus.
2 Socrates, Church History 1.17; Sozomen, Church History 21.1; Theodoret, Church
History 1.17.
3 In canon 7 of the Nicene Council, at Jonkers (1954), 42, Aelia is accorded a place of
honour after Caesarea, to be added to its own dignity; in fact it quickly overshadowed its
neighbour in the eyes of Christendom. It may be assumed that Macaiius and Eusebius were not
of one mind in theology, as there is no record of opposition to Macarius from the orthodox.
Nevertheless, in the list of subscribers to the Creed at Gelasius of Cyzicus, Church History
2.28.7, his name is coupled with that of the Caesarean, priority being accorded to Jerusalem.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
xxxviii
Constantine’s decoration of his reins with the nails of Christ. This text must
already have been sewn into the legend in the late fourth century, when Jerome
thought it worthy of his satire.' He was not, it should be said, an unbiased
witness, but a sedulous foe to Bishop John of Jerusalem, who in 392 honoured
Porphyry of Gaza with the post of Staurophylax, or custodian of the Cross.^
When Cyril of Alexandria glossed the verse in Zechariah with an allusion to
the treasures in Jerusalem,^ he was evidently repeating what he took to be a
common association. At the same time, he gave notice of the interests that
defined his role in later controversy, when he urged that it would belie both
Creed and gospel to deny that the Cross of Jesus was also that of God.
Thus from an aggregate of about ten writers, spanning the interval from
the middle of the fourth century to the last decades of the fifth, we can put
together a circumstantial and coherent narrative, which was circulating
rather than evolving, though in detail it betrays the slight plasticity that
characterizes even written tradition in this epoch of Church history. If we
seek a name for the author, we cannot improve on Borgehammar’s argument
for Gelasius of Caesarea,'' whose history was compiled around 360. Nor, for
all the rivalry of the sees, can we imagine that the impulse to invention
reached him from any other quarter than Jerusalem, for the tale brought fame
and profit to that city and its origins coincided with the earliest exhibitions
of the Cross. At the same time this survey of its antecedents shows that the
Inventio has made two momentous changes. Eirst, the blessed Macarius of
Jerusalem gives way to Kyriakos, whose see is merely the sanctuary of which
he is the warden. The corollary for him is an instantaneous transformation in
mid-story, for he both knows more and fears less as a Christian saint than as
a Jewish renegade. Second, the ecclesiastical primacy, even in Palestine and
even in the Greek version, is awarded to a personage called ‘Eusebius of
Rome’. While this is not a fictitious appellation, the only man who bore it
during this period lived too early to have seen Constantine’s conversion, let
alone to have acted as counsellor to Helena, whose journey to the Holy Land
is treated in all our sources as a sequel to the council of Nicaea in 325.
1 Commentary on Zechariah, book 3, ad loc.
2 Mark the Deacon, Life of Porphyry of Gaza 10,' see further Stemberger (2000), 59. On
Jerome and John see Kelly (1975), 192-205.
3 Commentary on Zechariah 94, cited at Holder, p. 49.
4 Borgehammar (1991), 3-57. If this is in substance the narrative that now survives in
Gelasius of Cyzicus, Church History 3.7.3-10, Macarius of Jerusalem had not merely an active
role but the longest speech in the original romance. The Jews do not yet figure in this account,
although a pagan statue does.
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XXXIX
Unless the Syriac text is the original, and the Greek and Latin have
misconstrued the word Rum* which denotes the Roman Empire rather than
the city, we must conclude that the author of the Inventio had two objects -
to chasten the pretensions of Jerusalem and to augment the dignity of the
Roman see.
This would not be a rare combination of motives after the middle of the
fourth century. Jerome, for example, having found nothing to content him
from Jerusalem to Palestine, took refuge in the fiat of the Roman Pope
Damasus from the interminable synods of the east.^ Some westerners feared
that Cyril of Jerusalem was an Arian, as he never affirmed that Christ was
consubstantial with the Father; in their eyes the stature of Damasus will have
risen when (although for different reasons) he declined to endorse the
council of Constantinople in 381, where Cyril was acquitted.^ The whole of
the west had a grievance against Jerusalem after 415, when a synod under
the bishop of that city found in favour of the arch-heretic Pelagius."* These
considerations do not imply that the Inventio must have been composed in
Latin; even an eastern bishopric might foster the authority of Rome to get the
better of a disputant or rival, and even a western author might have cause to
write in Greek. It should also be remembered that the Syriac and Latin texts
are conflations of two narratives, an Adventus and an Inventio, which might
be of different provenance - must be indeed, if the theory of a Greek origin
for the Inventio is maintained. While it is quite conceivable that a Greek
should wish Macarius out of the story and a Roman bishop into it, such an
author was evidently not the creator of our Eusebius, for in the Greek
Inventio nothing is said to introduce him or account for his intimacy with
Helena. The most probable solution is that the Adventus, written in Latin,
was a source for the Greek Inventio, and was used as a prolegomenon for
that text when it assumed a Latin dress.
It remains to propose a date for the invention of Eusebius. For our
terminus ante quern we are indebted to the Greek chronicler Agathangelos,
1 See Drijvers and Drijvers (1997). If it were permitted to us to toy with this hypothesis, I
would suggest that the intended name was that of Hosius, the emperor’s adviser and confessor
in the later years of his reign. On the ease with which the names Hosius and Eusebius were
confused in the Syriac script see Chadwick (1958), 297-98.
2 Jerome, Letters 16.2.2 and 17.2.2.
3 See Bright (1882), 92-96 on Roman opposition to the third canon of Constantinople
which, by according the place of honour after Rome to Constantinople, implied that worldly
stature was the measure of ecclesiastical rank.
4 See Merdinger (1997), 127 with n. 55.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
who, writing about 460, attests the baptism of Constantine by Eusebius but
says nothing of the Cross. ^ The decade after the council of Chalcedon in 451
was a propitious time for the distribution of Roman propaganda in the Greek
world, for the council itself had fortified its doctrine of two natures in the
person of Christ by canonizing a letter from Pope Leo, which had already
been provided with a meticulous equivalent in Greek. If then we assume that
Agathangelos is the earliest witness, and not merely the first one known to
us, we need not suppose that the legend of Eusebius was created more than
a generation earlier. The years between (say) 420 and 450 coincide with
theological strife in Italy, Africa and the eastern provinces; in almost every
controversy the bishop of Rome declared himself the arbiter, and pressed his
claim by dwelling on the antiquity, the majesty and the long-acknowledged
privileges of the apostolic see. It was in this spirit that the decrees of Pope
Gelasius, at the beginning of the sixth century, commemorated Eusebius as
the pope who had baptized the first Christian emperor and witnessed the
discovery of the Cross. If we take this as evidence that the, Adventus and the
Inventio had already been fused in a Latin text, the Greek original of the
Inventio can be assigned - with all the caveats that are usual in such matters
- to the final quarter of the fifth century.
SILVESTER AND THE DONATION OF CONSTANTINE
Except for the chronology and the proper names, the narrative of
Constantine’s conversion in the Latin and Syriac prologues to the Inventio is
the one told by Lactantius and Eusebius, which is generally agreed to be true
in substance. All there record that Constantine was about to fight a battle,
that in a dream the Cross was revealed to him as a sign of victory, that he
took it as his emblem, won the battle and was reborn. Unchallenged in its
own day, this tradition later acquired a rival, which, although it may have
even been born as humorous fantasy, was adopted as good history by some
pagans and was thought to deserve rebuttal by at least one Christian writer.
In his satirical dialogue, the Caesars, Julian the Apostate asserts that
Constantine put his son to death on a flimsy pretext, then, dismayed by his
own atrocity, sought absolution from the pagan gods. All the priests refused
him, except the Christians, who proclaim that every sin can be forgiven at no
1 Fowden (1994b), 160-62.
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cost.' The libel was repeated in the Chronicle of Eunapius and the New
History of Zosimus;^ Garth Fowden makes the plausible conjecture that the
most foolish yet most durable of all the Christian tales surrounding
Constantine was devised as a rejoinder to these texts.^ Nevertheless, the
main object of the Acts of the Blessed Silvester as it now exists is evidently
to glorify the papacy and to prove that the man who occupied the see in the
reign of Constantine had the right to be called a saint. No scholarly edition of
this document was available for translation in this volume,^ but the gist of it
is included in a translation of a later and still more influential figment,
generally known in English as the Donation of Constantine.
The first half of this edict (after its sonorous preamble) is a pure romance
in which the monarch relates the circumstances of his conversion. Para¬
phrasing the Acts of the Blessed Silvester, he recalls that as sole ruler he
maintained the persecution with a high hand, and was punished by God with
a leprosy that no medicines could cure. The Roman priests convinced him
that he must make himself a potion from the blood of 2000 infants, but
before he could initiate the massacre he was visited in a dream by the
apostles Peter and Paul. They told him that his remedy lay in the hands of
Pope Silvester, who was hiding in a cave with his priestly retinue. The cave
was found, and Constantine perceived that a miracle had been vouchsafed to
him when Silvester showed him perfect likenesses of the two apostles who
had come to him in the night. He therefore allowed the pontiff to baptize him
and confessed the Holy Trinity. After this testimony comes the Donation, in
which the emperor, avowing his intention of transferring the seat of
monarchy from Rome to Constantinople, grants to the pope the unrestricted
sovereignty of all the western provinces, together with Judaea. He also
1 Julian, Caesars 336b; see Lieu and Montserrat (1996), 18 for this passage, and 13-17 on
the contribution of Eunapius.
2 Zosimus, New History 2.29. On the tenor of his account of Constantine see Lieu and
Montserrat (1996), 15-17; for discussion of his sources see Woods (2001), 109-14.
3 Fowden (1994), 163-66 suggests that after Eunapius and Julian provoked the composition
of the Acts, they were parodied in turn by Zosimus.
4 Much of it is quoted in Pohlkamp (1988), and I have cited him liberally in the footnotes to
the Donation. Lieu and Montserrat (1996), 27 review a number of Byzantine adaptations, in
which the events described in the Acts supeiwene upon the vision of the Cross as this is
recounted by Eusebius and Lactantius. The half-converted Constantine, still driven to
persecution by his wife Maximiana, is now too squeamish to carry out the slaughter of the
children. Silvester, both here and in the original Acts, is less pusillanimous, and even slays a
dragon. In addition Lieu and Montserrat (1996), 144 n. 16 quote the testimony of Aldhelm, On
Virginity 25 that Silvester was the one who prompted Constantine to shift his capital.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
bestows a mitre, a diadem and purple raiment, though he admits that the
faithful minister of Christ declines to wear them. These presents and the
lands themselves are secured to the perpetual dominion of Silvester and his
pontifical successors; anyone who commutes or counteracts the gift is
threatened with the fires of hell; the official text of the edict is deposited and
the date appended in the Roman style.
All informed opinion since Lorenzo Valla’s treatise of 1440^ has agreed
that the Donation is a forgery. It falsifies the early career of Constantine,
perpetuates an incredible account of his conversion and slights not only truth
but probability when it makes him hand the fruits of a life of strategy and
bloodshed to a cleric who had never swung a sword. Nowhere does the
genuine legislation of Constantine show any knowledge of this document,
and indeed it is never cited within five centuries of the date at which it
purports to have been composed. Its radical defects are aggravated by a rash
of anachronisms in geography, theology and diction; only the name of the
emperor’s fellow consul Gallicanus in the final sentence seems to aim at
verisimilitude.^ Yet whereas Valla, the humanist and reformer, was content
to mingle proofs of the forger’s ignorance and temerity with censorious
parentheses on the avarice of popes, the historian in the modem age turns
these blemishes into virtues by construing them as indices of the audience,
date and motive of an author who was evidently wise in his generation. He
was well aware, for instance, that a classical vocabulary would not be so
impressive to contemporaries as one that echoed the tone of legislation since
Justinian, the Constantine of the sixth century, who had rescued the Church
from heresy and Italy from the Goths. Thus the word divalia, which would
have been an archaism to Constantine, was restored to use in the Digest of
Justinian, and applied to the imperial letters received from eastern emperors
by some popes in the Book of Pontiffs. The Persian title satrap, which as
Valla rightly says would have been incongruous in Roman legislation, was
used of local governors in the same period hy Germanic overlords.^ The
occurrence of these terms in the Donation is a small part of the evidence that
leads scholars to assign it to the embryonic period of the Carolingian
Empire. More cogent still is the silence of every witness before the ninth
1 The Emperor Otto III denounced the document even in the eleventh century: Maffei
(1964), 15-16.
2 See my notes on the final paragraph.
3 For these observations see the relevant notes to the Donation in this volume.
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xliii
century,* and most convincing of all the clear utility of this document to the
Roman Church of the eighth in its endeavours to strike new covenants with
the temporal powers in Italy and France.
In this age an extension of the lands that were governed by the Roman
see went hand in hand with an enlargement of its spiritual pretensions. In
public works and charities the popes displayed an opulence that dazzled
their biographers and intimidated princes. Nevertheless their authority
remained tenuous, and was strengthened by precarious alliances with two
nations: the Franks, who had become Christians under Clovis in the sixth
century, and the Lombards whose conversion at the turn of the seventh
century was the crowning work of Gregory the Great.^ The Lombards had
made frequent benefactions to the Roman see in the hope of marrying
secular hegemony with spiritual advantage; in the first half of the eighth
century, however, they began to advance their own frontiers by preying on
papal territories, and the duchies of Ravenna and Spoleto became the prizes
of an oscillating war. In earlier times the popes would have sought protection
from the emperor in Byzantium, whom they still professed to acknowledge
as their sovereign; but the emperors of this period were iconoclasts,
committed to the abolition of images in defiance of tradition and a great part
of the clergy, and were therefore heretics in the eyes of Rome. Consequently
a new league was cemented with the Frankish ruler Pepin, who was building
both a dynasty and an empire on the ruins of the Merovingian monarchy. In
774 the Lombard kingdom fell, and Rome was honoured by the presence of
the victor Charles, son of Pepin, whom we know as Charlemagne or Charles
the Great.
Throughout the Donation traces of these events are all too visible. The
pictures of Paul and Peter that Silvester shows to Constantine would have
been mere curiosities to the traveller, and idols to the zealot of the fourth
century,^ but in the eighth such relics were indispensable phylacteries
against iconoclasm. Pope after pope exhibits his devotion to them in the
1 See Migne (1844), 569-70 for a catalogue of witnesses; it is generally agreed that the
earliest pope to cite the edict was Leo IX, in a hostile letter of 1054 to the patriarch of
Constantinople Michael Cerularius. See Maffei (1964), 16-17, but note too the possibility that
Hadrian I alludes to the Donation in a letter to Charlemagne in 778: Codex Carolinus 60, cited
at Walter (1970), 171 n. 58.
2 On the Lombards and the papacy see Wallace-Hadrill (1967), 43-63 and Davis (1992)
passim.
3 See Thiimmel (1992) on the uniformity of the official voices in the fourth century; Grigg
(1977) on the views of Constantine.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
Book of Pontijfs. One of the principal aims of the Donation is to show that
the Church of Rome owes no allegiance to Byzantium, since Constantine’s
migration left the western lands in the absolute possession of Silvester and
his successors. Since the iconoclasts had claimed the right to appoint their
own patriarchs,* the Donation hardly ever uses the titles pope and pontiff
without the qualifying epithets ‘universal’ and ‘supreme’. We may wonder
whether Rome had as many churches in the pontificate of Silvester as the
Donation implies;^ the Book of Pontiffs lists them with their treasures in the
biography of Silvester, the longest before the eighth century, and commends
the restorations that were carried out in that century under a number of the
popes. The scrupulous description of crowns and vestments in the document
seems as meretricious to us as it did to Valla;^ but in an age when wealth and
ostentation were synonymous, the Book of Pontiffs seems determined not to
rob the Church of a single fabric, let alone a jewelled Cross or a golden
chalice, in its inventories of ecclesiastical treasures. The compilers who
appear to have been contemporaries of Charlemagne recorded his
munificence and spared no detail of the vivid pageants that preceded both
his baptism by Pope Hadrian I and his reception of the imperial diadem from
Leo III.‘* The mantle, tunic and diadem which Charlemagne paraded at this
ceremony were all listed among the insignia that Constantine bestows on
Pope Silvester in the Donation', the successors of Silvester in the eighth
century transferred this regal garb from the heretics of Byzantium to an
emperor who restored an orthodox and Roman government to the west.^
One precedent for the forgery that must not be overlooked is the
Donation of Quierzy in 754, by which Pepin guaranteed to the pope the
1 See Herrin (1987), 340—43 on the forced resignation of Germanus of Constantinople
under Leo the Isaurian.
2 See my notes on the Lateran, St Peter’s and St Paul’s.
3 Valla, Donat. 15.48-18.60 (pp. 42-53 Schwahn). The order of coronation in the tenth
century already found it necessary to state that the gems on the crown were emblems of virtue:
Elze(1960), 9.
4 See Einhard, Life of Charlemagne 23, Folz (1974) and the selected witnesses in Pullan
(1971), 11-14. The precedent had already been set by Constantine and his posterity. See
Bowersock (1986) on the inflation of regal and sacerdotal dignity in the fourth century;
Dufraigne (1997), 73-83 and 250-325 on the Christian appropriation of the triumphal
adventus.
5 This observation is pursued at length by Gregorovius (1971), 55-64, though at 73ff. he
blames the rise of papal supremacy and the ‘theocratic principle’ on Charlemagne’s weaker
heirs.
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INTRODUCTION
xlv
enjoyment of his present territories.' It is also worthy of note that two
successive pontiffs, the brothers Stephen II and Paul, both ostentatious
devotees of images and (from time to time) of Pepin, were the offspring of a
man named Constantine. That name became notorious when, after Paul’s
demise in 767, Constantine II, Duke of Toto, seized the papacy, and, though
a layman, seems to have possessed it with the approval of his eastern
namesake Constantine V. The Franks rejected Constantine II, and the Book
of Pontiffs does not even recognize his tenure.^ At the same time, the
frequency with which the name of Constantine the Great was attached to
ecclesiastical buildings of this era has been noticed by historians, and
utterances attributed to this Constantine make up the longest of the twenty
items in Pope Hadrian’s collection of decrees.^ Charlemagne himself took
Constantine the Great as his model in portraiture.'' If, then, the Donation was
composed around 770,^ when the Lombard realm was already dead or
toppling and Byzantium was less powerful than the Franks, one of its objects
will have been to show that any potentate who bore the name of Constantine
could justify it only if, as pope, he stood in the true line from Silvester or, as
emperor, he divided his prerogatives with the apostolic see.
Another aim - to build up the reputation of the Lateran, which had
hitherto been overshadowed by St Peter’s - is suggested by the greatest
living authority on the Donation, W. Pohlkamp.® He also defends the author
against the imputation of falsehood, urging that we should read his work as
an essay in the recreation of history. We might say rather, an essay in the
creation of a false historical memory, for it is clear enough that no-one
appealed to the document in the centuries that followed unless they thought
that it was, or at least pretended to be, a statute handed down by Constantine.
1 On the authenticity and authority of this grant see Davis (1992), 107-11. Halphen (1977),
20-23 maintains that the Donation inspired the ceremony at which the king prostrated himself
before the pope, and therefore was already in existence by 754. Wallace-Hadrill (1967), 93
suggests, a little fancifully, that Stephen II produced the text to reinforce his position at the
meeting.
2 See Davis (1992), 85-87.
3 See Hinschius (1863), 766.
4 See Walter (1970), 171 n. 59.
5 The view of Davis (1992), 110. Mirbt and Aland (1967), 107 give a date of 757—767
without further commentaiy. Folz (1974), 109-11 suggests that the Donation was intended to
confirm the legitimacy of Pepin’s grant of 754 - which surely supports my thesis that it
represents the common interests of the Franks and Rome. For a review of theories old and new
see Maffei (1964), 1-10.
6 Pohlkamp (1988).
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
The success of such deceptions is more easily explained if they occur at the
behest of an authority that has power to silence doubt. Whether it was Rome,
or Rome alone, that had the motive and the power to forge the Donation in
the eighth century is, however, a different question. Although it served the
interests of the papacy at the time, it is not a charter of absolute supremacy,
for it indicates that a pontiff will prefer indigence to riches, and that
whatever goods he may possess in this world come to him only from the
hand of his temporal lord.' If the popes were ever to reclaim the crown that
their modesty had ceded to Byzantium, it could only be to put it on the head
of a worthier sovereign. We know of at least one occasion on which the
crown overreached the papacy: in 774 the Donation of Charlemagne
confirmed and amplified the terms of Pepin’s donation, and thus secured the
allegiance of the Roman see, but the promise of new estates was not made
good at any time in the long reign of the donor.^ In the later Middle Ages, the
Donation was perhaps a double-edged sword in the hands of prelates who
demanded not the friendship but the submission of worldly powers;^ and it
was useless to the popes of the Renaissance, in the century after Valla, when
they were buffeted from different sides by the Erench king and the Holy
Roman emperor - each in his way the heir of Charlemagne.
NOTE ON THE TEXTS AND TRANSLATIONS
The only available text of the Oration to the Saints is that of Heikel (1902).
The Greek text of the Inventio used here is that of Holder (1899); for the
Latin I have also used his edition, but with an eye to his apparatus and the
critical text prepared by Borgehammar (1991). The majority of my notes are
attached to the Latin, because it is the longer; I have annotated the Greek
1 This corollary does not suggest itself, e.g. to Ullmann (1965), 61, where it is argued that
the document represents the emperor as holding power ‘by sufferance’ of the pontiff. None the
less, the notes to the edition of Migne (1835), 569-70 record the speculation that it was forged
by a Greek to show that the prerogatives of the Roman see were of merely human origin, and
one scholar even claimed to have discovered the Greek exemplar (p. 579). On the Greek
editions that came to light in the Renaissance see Fuhrmann (1968), 38—41. Even if a genuine
Greek archetype existed, it would not prove that the forger worked in the east or wished to
compromise the papacy, for, as Wallace-Hadrill (1967), 62 observes, Rome became an asylum
for Byzantine malcontents under the Iconoclasts.
2 Davis (1992), 111-22 defends both the authenticity of the grant and the integrity of
Chaidemagne.
3 According to Walter (1970), 171—74, even Leo IX, and even in a picture at the Lateran,
preferred to be shown receiving the crown directly from the apostles.
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INTRODUCTION
xlvii
where there was no corresponding passage in the Latin, or where the
language seemed to demand a comment. Texts of the Donation are all too
numerous, and many will regret that I have followed the one reproduced in
the Abbe Migne’s Patrologia Latina. * This choice is not intended as a slight
to the modern researches which have shown that this is not the most
primitive version; it merely reflects my opinion that, when we have to do
with a forgery, the archetype is of less historical interest than the version that
has seduced the largest public. The Migne text is the one that has been most
accessible for the last millennium, and consequently the one that a historian
of the mediaeval period will most often have occasion to consult. In any case
Migne’s text diverges little from that of Fuhrmann, which has some claim to
be the most original;^ in my footnotes I have indicated the discrepancies,
together with the reasons that have led the Church to give precedence to the
reading in the Patrologia. I have, however, borrowed the division into
chapters which Fuhrmann and other editors have found conducive to ease of
reference and the relief of tedium. Like the other documents in this volume,
the Donation is the work of a man whose style was too ambitious for his
talents; except where I have pruned their solecisms or expanded abbrevia¬
tions, I have endeavoured to produce an accurate crib for all these authors,
retaining as many of their infelicities and extravagances as modern English
idiom will bear.
1 More precisely Migne (1844), because it contains notes that are lacking in the edition of
1853.1 have not detected any disagreement between the two.
2 See Fuhrmann (1968), 9-10, maintaining with Grauert (1882) the superiority of the
‘Frankish’ tradition against the defence of the ‘Pseudo-Isidorian’ redaction in Williams (1964).
Both parties agree in dating the earliest version to the ninth century.
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CONSTANTINE: THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
Constantine Augustus,* to the assembly^ of the saints.
1 . The splendour that outshines day and the sun,^ the prelude to the
resurrection, the new composition of bodies which have travailed in times
past, the sanction of the promise and the road that leads to eternal life,^ the
day of the passion^ is here, O most beloved leaders, and all you other dear
men. It is made blessed, also by the great multitude of worshippers and by
the very God who is worshipped, declared as he is in oracles,® through the
inner senses of each person and through the utterances of unceasing hymns.^
As for you, all-mothering nature,* what did you ever before bring to
1 Though Lactantius, Pers. 24.9 confers the title Augustus on Constantine as soon as he
proclaims himself successor to Constantius in 306, his permanent assumption of it is dated by
Creed (1984), 105 n. 6 to some time after his maiTiage to Maximian’s daughter Fausta on July
25 in 307. Barnes (1976a), 417 deduces from the absence of the title Niketes (Victor) that the
speech was composed before Constantine’s defeat of Licinius in 324. The title was employed in
all his subsequent correspondence, except (as Lane Fox (1986), 779-80 notes) in a letter to
King Sapor of Persia (Eusebius, Constantine 4.9). In that case, however, the omission may be
explained as a prudent courtesy in writing to a sovereign of equal or greater power.
2 For sullogos as a Christian congregation see Origen, Against Celsus 3.51 etc. ‘Saints’, as
in the New Testament, denotes all the living Christians in any congregation.
3 Cf. Constantine’s letter to Alexandria at Eusebius, Constantine 3.67, and for the origin of
the metaphor see John 9.5, Eph. 5.14 etc.
4 Combining Matt. 7.13-14 and parallels with e.g. John 6.68.
5 That is, it is Good Friday. It outshines the sun despite the darkness of Matt. 27.45 par.; it
is the prelude to the resurrection because of Matt. 27.53. On Constantine’s concern with the
date of Easter see Eusebius, Constantine 3.18, and for another celebration of the Passion see
Constantine 3.30.1.
6 Both those of the Jewish prophets and those of the Sibyl, on whom see Chapter 18.
7 As Heikel regards his own text as corrupt, I have given a sense that is closer to the
emended version offered in the apparatus criticus. The precept that God should be worshipped
both with the heart and with the voice is a biblical commonplace (Col. 3.16), though Origen,
First Principles 1.1.9 etc. is the source of the notion of ‘spiritual senses’.
8 Personified by contemporary Platonists as an artisan subordinate to Intellect: Plotinus,
Enneads 3.8.4. On the inadequacy of naturalistic or ‘physical’ cosmologies see Irenaeus,
Against Heresies 2.29; Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 4.2. As an agent in God’s service
nature has her role at e.g. Clement, Stromateis 3.83 and Origen, Against Celsus 6.60.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
perfection in the world to match this? What in short is your workmanship, if
the cause of all is also the cause of your being? Eor this one fashioned your
nature, since the order* of nature is life according to nature.^ For there
prevailed a quite incongruous state of affairs: no-one showed reverence to
the God of all in the manner that befits him, and all things were believed to
be held together not through providence^ but at random without order or
regulation. While among all nations the divine Spirit was announcing these
tidings through prophets,'* impious unrighteousness, far from rendering
them obedience, withstood them with every kind of stratagem, calumniating
the light of truth while it embraced the all too plausible claim of darkness.^
Nor was even this achieved without force and savagery, especially the
collusion of the policy of the rulers with the mindless onslaught of the vulgar
populace.® Rather, indeed, it was this policy that instigated this untimely
madness. For this reason, a life of this kind, oppressed for many generations,
was a cause of the greatest evils to the people of the time.
But when, of a sudden, the Saviour made his brilliant sojourn, righteous¬
ness came into being in place of unrighteous works, and peace in place of the
multitudinous wave;’ and everything that the prophets had predicted came to
pass. Therefore, lifted up high to his paternal hearth,® having compassed the
1 ‘Order’ renders the Greek word kosmos, often translated ‘world’. In the New Testament, it
is used in contrast to ktisis to signify the realm of sin and bondage (John 3.16, 17.14 etc.).
2 A Stoic definition of virtue, already commended to Christians by Rom. 1.26.
3 Though parallels might be drawn with Plato, Timaeus 30a, or with Lactantius, Z)/ 1.21.1,
defence of providence is, as Bolhuis (1956), 26 remarks, a desideratum for any thinker who
wishes to oppose the fatalism of the Stoics or the Epicurean derivation of all events from the
random motion of atoms. It might be added that providence, in the sense of a disinterested
vigilance for the welfare of his subjects, is also the characteristic of a good emperor, as
Corcoran (1996), 147^8 observes, citing Theodosian Code 7.20.2.5-6.
4 Cf. Heb. 1.1 on the preparation of the Gospel in Israel; Justin, First Apology 43.12 on the
inspiration of the Gentiles through the Sibyl and Hystaspes; Theophilus, Autolycus 9 and
Clement, Stromateis 6.42 on the concuiTent inspiration of Jews and Gentiles.
5 Cf. Eph. 3.18-21 for the antithesis between light and truth.
6 Perhaps an allusion to the death of Socrates, on which see Chapter 9. Chapter 25 asserts
that the people of Diocletian’s reign were better than their rulers, no doubt because Christianity
had already shed its light upon the world.
7 Cf. Gen. 1.2, Ps. 69.1, Isa. 57.1, Rev. 21.1 and Theophilus, Autolycus 2. for the use of
water as an image of the godless world.
8 The word hestia, also used by Constantine in his letter to Antiochenes (Eusebius,
Constantine 3.60), combines the senses of ‘altai'’ and ‘hearth’. Its presence here may be inspired
by the use of it elsewhere as an appellation for Jerusalem, e.g. at Eusebius, Tricennial 9. Or
Constantine may have in mind the mysterious hearth which is said to remain unmoved at Plato,
Phaedrus 247a.
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THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
3
inhabited world with the rays of awe and temperance, he established the
Church on earth to be, as it were, a sacred temple of virtue, eternal,
indestructible, in which the things due to God his most exalted Father and
those proper to himself were reverently performed. What then did the raging
wickedness' of the nations contrive after this? Its schemes were to oust the
gracious works of Christ and destroy the Church which had been founded
for the salvation of everyone, and it set up anew its own superstition,^ so that
once again strife, wars, battles, an intractable way of life and love of money
(which is by nature germane to wickedness^) might sometimes charm by
specious hopes and sometimes strike with fear. But let this [wickedness] lie,
subdued by virtue as is right, torn apart and scattered by repentance.'' Our
task now is to say what pertains to the divine Word.^
2. Hear now Church,® you pilot intent on purity and virginity, you nurse of
immature and ignorant youth, whose care is truth and love of humankind,
whose ever-flowing springs exude the liquor of salvation. I pray you, listen
favourably, you who worship God rightly^ and are therefore dear to him,
attending not to the diction but to the truth of what is said, not to me the
speaker but to the reverence of my devotion.® For what profit would there be
in words if the disposition of the speaker were left unexamined? If therefore
1 Cf. Ps. 2.1: ‘Why do the heathen rage?’
2 Even before the Romans had begun to speak of Christianity as a superstitio, Christians had
applied its Greek equivalent deisidaimonia to the religion of the Greeks: Acts 17.22.
3 Cf. 1 Tim. 6.10, Matt. 13.22 etc.
4 The word metanoia was used since apostolic times to denote the Christian’s turning from
his sins and from the world: Mark 1.15, Rom. 2.4, Acts 26.20 etc.
5 Here, as often in Christian prose, one is not sure whether logos should be construed as a
common noun or as an epithet of Christ; cf. John 10.35, Heb. 4.12 and Origen, Philokalia 5.4 on
Christ as the Word behind the ‘many words’ of scripture.
6 Perhaps combining the image of Noah’s Ark (applied to the church at 1 Pet. 3.20, Origen,
Genesis Homily 2.5 etc.) with that of the woman clothed with the sun at Rev. 12.1 (identified as
the church by Methodius, Symposium 8.5). Lane Fox (1986), 631 observes that the word
ekklesia is inserted by Heikel, and conjectures that the pilot may have been not the congregation
but its leader. Nevertheless, the whole congregation is addressed elsewhere in the second person
singular.
7 Cf. John 4.24.
8 Real or feigned lack of eloquence could be turned to account in various ways, especially
by a practised orator: see e.g. Antiphon, The Murder of Herodes 1.1 (on the authority of
experience where the art of speech is wanting); Ovid, Metamorphoses 13.10 (on the superiority
of deeds to words); Dio Chrysostom, Oration 32.39 (on the professional duplicity of sophists).
Christians would remember the disclaimer of Paul at 1 Cor. 2.1—4.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
I dare great things, I ascribe my daring to my implanted^ love for the divine,
since this represses even awe. I therefore recruit as allies those who under¬
stand the divine mysteries,^ so that if any error befalls my words, you may be
at hand to correct it,^ not looking for exactitude of learning but accepting the
faithfulness of the attempt. And may the greatest inspiration from the Eather
and his beneficent Son be present to me as I say whatever things it expresses
and puts into my mind.^ For if anyone without God’s help pursues rhetorical
skill, or any other supposes that he perfects his work adequately, both he and
what he labours at are revealed to be unfruitful.^ Yet no-one who has once
enjoyed the divine inspiration ought to tremble or delay. Let us now there¬
fore, eschewing a lengthy preamble, attempt to fulfil our aim.
3. The good to which all things aspire, the God who is for ever above all
being, has no birth and therefore no beginning.® For he himself is the origin’
of all that comes to be. And the one who received his beginning from him is
united to him again, undergoing separation and union with him not in space*
but intellectually. For it is not through any internal lesion in the Father’s
bowels® that the one begotten has come to be, as is naturally the case with
things that come from seeds; rather it was by the dispensation of providence,
which contrived that he was to be the governor of the sensible world and its
inhabitants. Hence also comes the cause of being and life to all things which
1 Cf. James 1.21. In view of Constantine’s account of his youth in Chapter 11, we cannot
ascribe to him an ‘innate’ love of God.
2 For musteria as the higher doctrines of the church see Mark 4.1; Ignatius, Trallians 2.3 etc.
The word in the Latin original may also have been mysteria, as in Rufinus’ rendering of Origen,
First Principles 1.2.3.
3 A layman’s plea, as in Origen, First Principles 1.6.4 etc.
4 For the prayer that God will guide his meditation cf. Ps. 19.14; for the claim to speak in the
spirit of the Lord cf. 1 Cor. 7.40.
5 Cf. Ps. 127.1: ‘except the Lord build the house they labour in vain’.
6 Constantine may not have been aware that his first two clauses marry Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics 1094a with Plato, Republic 509b. The latter text is quoted in Plato’s own
words by Eusebius {Ecclesiastical Theology 1.7), who is therefore plainly not the translator of
the present text. That God has no beginning is an axiom of Christian apologetic: Aristides,
Apology 1 etc. For God as the supreme good see Alcinous, Isagoge 10; Clement of Alexandria,
Schoolmaster 1.8 etc.
7 For the term arkhe cf. Rev. 21.6 and Origen, Commentary on John 1.16-19.
8 Cf. the argument of Athenagoras, Embassy 8, that polytheism would entail the occupation
of different spaces by different gods which is self-evidently absurd.
9 By contrast Arius urged that the Father must suffer division or passion if he begets a son:
Socrates, Church History 1.15.
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THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
5
are compassed in the world. Hence too come the soul and all senses and the
organs through which significant information is imparted to the senses.
What then does the argument show? That there is one overseer for all
existent things, and that everything is subjected to his sole rulership, both
things in heaven and those on earth,' both natural objects and organic
bodies.^ For if there were not one but many authorities over these innumer¬
able things, there would be share-outs and divisions of elements and [things
told in] ancient myths;^ envy and avarice, dominating according to their
power, would mar the harmonious concord of the whole,'' as many disposed
in different ways of the shares allotted to each, and took no thought to
maintain the whole world in the same state and according to the same
principles. And who would know the Maker of the whole realm of being?
Who would be first or last in prayers and litanies?^ To whom could I pay
especial worship without impiety to others?® Or perhaps if I had need of
something for my livelihood, I would offer thanks to the one who aided me,
but blamed the one who withstood? From whom would I have prayed to
1 For this phrase, indicating the subjection of the entire creation to Jesus, cf. Eph. 1.10, Phil.
2.10 etc.
2 This would mean a body endowed with organs, according to the majority of modern and
ancient interpreters of Aristotle; cf. Chalcidius, On the Timaeus 258. It is possible, however, if
the original was in Latin, that the Greek is a mistranslation of some phrase like instrwnento
elementorum at Tertullian, Apology 17.
3 On myths as incitements to immorality and false doctrine cf. 1 Tim. 4.7; Plato, Republic
391; Aristides, Apo/ogy 13.7 etc.
4 This reasoning can be traced to Aristotle, Metaphysics 12, 1076a, though it becomes
especially frequent in Christian authors in the age of Constantine. See Edwards (1999b), 272,
citing Lactantius, D1 1.3.18-19; Athanasius, Against the Nations 36-38; Eusebius, Tricennial
6. Aristotle quotes a line from Homer {Iliad 2.20.40), and the analogies between the rule of god
and the earthly government of the emperor had already been drawn by flatterers such as Dio
Chrysostom in his Third Oration. The edicts of the persecutor Maximinus Daia had maintained
that the gods do everything in harmony, while Latin Panegyrics 2(10). 11 likens the joint mle of
Maximian and Diocletian to the partnership of Jupiter and Hercules, who rule the world
through lesser deities.
5 Early pagan hymns suggest that the worshipper made this choice, but Orphic poetry had
already insisted that Zeus must be the first, the middle and the last, while Christians assigned
these places in a rigid order to Father, Son and Holy Ghost. See Matt. 28.19; Justin, 1 Apology
13.3 etc.
6 To judge by Latin Panegyrics 11(3).3 the answer is Jupiter, who had recently been
personified on earth by Diocletian, while his junior colleague Maximian played the role of
Hercules. The author of this eulogy, like the author of 10(2), commends the more than fraternal
amity of the emperors, no doubt because some had doubted whether a realm divided could
remain at peace.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
know the cause of the present calamity and thought fit to obtain relief? Let
us imagine that we had received responses from oracles and prophecies, but
that it was not in our power and these things were the province of another
god: what pity would there be, what pity would there be, what providential
oversight of God with regard to humanity? Unless indeed the one who was
more philanthropically disposed ruled by violence over the one who had no
relation to him. The result would be wrath, strife and vituperation, as each
neither minded his own business nor was content, through avarice, with his
booty; then finally the confusion of all things would follow. What then after
this? Obviously the strife of things in heaven would devastate those under
heaven and on earth; the procession of the seasons, the change of times and
the enjoyment of the fruits that grow in accordance with the times would have
disappeared, and so would day and the nightly rest that succeeds it. Enough
now of these things and let us return once again to the irrefutable argument.'
4 . Whatever has a beginning has also an end, and a temporal beginning is
called coming to be.^ But all things that come to be are corruptible and time
effaces their form. How then could things that come of corruptible genera¬
tion be immortal? The sort of opinion that goes the rounds among unthinking
people is the belief that there is marriage and begetting among the gods.^ But
if those born are immortal, and they are perpetually being born, the race is
bound to increase excessively. As this increase supervenes, what heaven,
what earth has accommodated such a great swarm of supervenient gods?
What is one to say of men who join heavenly siblings in fellowship by
marriage, and reprimand adultery and incontinence? Let us say boldly that
even their honours and their tributes from men have been compounded with
overweening and impurity. For as it is, one who composes metrical hymns,
or even puts together hymns without a metre,'' and a statue-maker who
1 Or again ‘Word’, i.e. Christ. Cf. Justin, lApology 5; Eusebius, Tricennial 15 (p. 245.19
Heikel).
2 A cardinal assumption of Greek philosophy, e.g. Aristotle, On Coming to be and Passing
away and Plato, Timaeus 28a-b. Constantine appears to be unaware that the verb gignesthai
(‘come to be’) was now employed by Platonists to signify ontological dependence without
temporal beginning: see Dillon (1977), 243.
3 Though, as Bolhuis (1956), 29 obseiwes, this too is a commonplace, it is likely enough that
Constantine drew most of his commonplaces from Lactantius. This one occurs at DI 1.16.5-6.
4 The prose hymn is only scantily represented in the literature that survives from classical
times. The chief examples are those of the second-century sophist Aelius Aristides, and the
Emperor Julian’s hymns to the Sun and the Mother of the Gods, which were composed a
generation after the death of Constantine.
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THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
7
conceives some form in his intellect' fabricate an artificial plaything, and as
it were forgetting in the meantime pays it pious homage as an immortal god,
though he confesses that he, the father and maker of the statue, is mortal.
And they themselves display the tombs and monuments of those gods,^ and
pay tribute to them in death with immortal honours, not knowing that what is
truly blessed and incorruptible has no need of honour from those who are
corruptible. For what is visible to the mind and apprehensible to the intellect
neither desires a form by which it may be known nor submits to a shape such
as an image or representation. But all these things occur for the sake of the
dead, for they were human beings when they shared the life of the body.^
5. But why do I stain my tongue with polluted words, when my intention is
to hymn the true god?"* First indeed, I wish to cleanse my mouth, as though
from bitterness, by the sacred drink.^ Now the sacred drink pours from the
ever-flowing spring of the God who is hymned among us, and my proper
task is to hymn Christ through my way of life and the thanksgiving due to
him from us in return for many great benefits.® This one, I say, established
the beginnings of this entire world, and invented a constitution for human
beings by legislating with his word,^ then forthwith accommodated the
newborn beings in a certain blessed and flowery place, rich in fruits of many
kinds, wishing them at first to be untutored in good and evil,* but finally to
give them the seat on earth that belongs only to the rational creature, and
1 Cf. Plotinus, Enneads 5.8.1, where the insight of the sculptor is commended, but not the
translation of it into plastic form.
2 Cf. Tertullian, Apology 25; Athenagoras, Embassy 28 and 30, citing the Hellenistic poet
Callimachus, Hymn 1. 8-9 on the grave of Zeus. Tit. 1.12 is a garbled echo of the same lines.
3 The theory of Euhemerus, that all gods were originally mortals, would be known to Latin
speakers through the translation made by Ennius, the father of Latin poetry, and cited by
Lactantius, DI 1.11-14. Cf. Eusebius, TricenniaU 13.
4 A variation on the pagan commonplace, ‘why do I speak of an oak or a rock?’, sometimes
used as a preface to the reported words of a god: Hesiod, Theogony 35; Porphyry, Plotinus 22.
5 Cf. Origen, Homily on Numbers 28.10 (on the sweetening of the waters of Marah at Num.
33.8).
6 Here Constantine conforms to Origen’s precept that Christ may receive thanksgiving and
intercession, though not the adoration to which the Father alone is entitled. See, however, my
note on the final paragraph of the speech.
7 Here and elsewhere Constantine plays on the fact that logos seiwed both as an ordinary
noun meaning ‘reason’ or ‘utterance’ and as the proper name of Christ in the Trinity.
8 Apart from Gen. 2.9 (on the plants of Eden) and 3.3 (on the prohibition of the tree of
knowledge), this passage is also redolent of the flowery plain of truth at Plato, Phaedrus 248b,
where souls have not yet felt the touch of evil (250c).
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
then indeed to unfold the knowledge of good and evil as befits rational
creatures.* At that time^ he bade the race to increase, so that the whole area
enclosed within the circuit of the Ocean^ might be inhabited. But as
humankind multiplied in this way, and arts useful to life were discovered,
the race of irrational creatures multiplied at an equal rate.'* A certain special
power of nature was found for each kind: in gentle creatures meekness and
submissiveness to humans, in savage ones strength, swiftness and a sort of
native intuition of the means of escaping dangers.^ And by his legislation he
enjoined on humans a certain care for gentle creatures, but a certain conflict
with the savage ones.® And after this he formed the race of birds,^ very great
in number and diverse in nature and habits, outstanding in its variety of
colours and endowed with an innate musical harmony. And having distin¬
guished all the other things that the world holds in its embrace, and having
defined a fixed rule of life for all these, he arranged the most perfect
fulfilment of the whole.
6 . The majority of people, however, in their stupidity make nature the cause
of the ordering of all things, though some of them ascribe it to fate or
1 Apparently taking the view of Theophilus, Autolycus 2.25 and Irenaeus, Against Heresies
4.38-39, that knowledge of good and evil was only temporarily denied to Adam and Eve. There
seems to be here no doctrine of the fall described in Genesis 2-3.
2 Exegetes of the fourth century laid stress on the ‘difference of times’ between the old
covenant and the new: the former not only countenanced polygamy but failed to perceive the
blessings of the celibate condition.
3 According to e.g. Homer, Iliad 14.301-02 (cited by Athenagoras, Embassy 18.3), this
river encircles all the land of the world, and is also the origin of the gods.
4 Lovejoy and Boas (1935), 96 adduce Cicero, Ojfices 2.5, which ascribes to the Hellenistic
thinker Dicaearchus the claim that beasts had sometimes become so populous as to exterminate
the humans in their territory. But Constantine may be using the brutes as a symbol of vicious
passions, as Theophilus does at Autolycus 17. In that case he is repeating the Roman platitude,
exemplified in Lucretius, On Nature 5 and Seneca, Letter 90, that moral corruption always
accompanies progress in the arts. It was characteristic of Hellenistic, rather than classical,
thinkers to extol the primitive state, and characteristic of Romans, rather than Greeks, to dwell
on the evils that attended the development of the arts.
5 Cf. Plato, Protagoras 320d; Pliny, Natural History 1 proem; Lactantius, On the Workman¬
ship of God 2—3.
6 This distinction, manifestly lacking in the command to subdue all creatures at Gen. 1.28,
is none the less presumed in the occasional exegesis of the dietary laws as parabolic injunctions
to befriend the righteous and avoid the wicked: see e.g. Barnabas 10.3.
7 Genesis 20-25 suggests rather that God created first the creatures of the sea, then those of
air, then those on land.
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THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
9
chance.^ When they attribute to fate the capacity for these things, they do not
even understand, when they use the name ‘fate’, that they are uttering a
name but not indicating an activity or an underlying substance.^ For what
would fate be in itself if nature has given birth to everything? Or what would
nature be thought to be, if the law of fate is not to be transgressed? But the
very assertion that fate is a law reveals that every law is the work of the
lawgiver.^ Now fate, if it is a law, would be the invention of God; everything
therefore is subject to God and nothing exempt from his power. And we
accept that fate is, and is reckoned to be, the will of God, but how can
righteousness, discretion and the other virtues be according to fate?"* And
whence come their contraries, unrighteousness and incontinence? For wicked¬
ness is from nature,^ but not from fate, and virtue is the correction of
character and manners. As to the lapses, or conversely the corrections, of the
good and right will, however, which yield different results according to
chance or fate, and everything that is just or apportioned to each according to
his desert, how are these according to fate?® As to laws and exhortations to
virtue and dissuasions from what is wrong and praises and censures and
punishments and everything which either prompts us to virtue or leads us
away from wickedness, how is this said to arise not from righteousness.
1 ‘Fate’ may represent the Stoic position, attacked e.g. by Justin, lApology 7; Hippolytus,
Refutation 1.21.1-2; Eusebius, Tricennial 13. ‘Chance’ stands for the atomism of the
Epicureans, on which see e.g. Theophilius, Autolycus 2.4 and Lactantius, DI 1.9-20. But since
he is taking issue with the ‘majority’, Constantine must also have in mind the popular doctrines
of astrology, attacked e.g. by Tatian, Oration 8-11.
2 According to Stobaeus, Eclogues 1.79.1-12, the great Stoic thinker Chrysippus styled fate
sometimes a logos, sometimes a pneumatic substance (ousia). Both terms apply to Christ in
Constantine’s vocabulary.
3 On God as the author of the natural law see Psalm 19; Theophilus, Awro/ycw.? 5; Numenius,
Fr. 13 Des Places, cited by Eusebius, Gospel Preparation 11.18.13-14.
4 The four cardinal virtues of philosophy after Plato are justice {dikaiosune, here translated
‘righteousness’); temperance, moderation or discretion (sophrosune); wisdom {sophia)\ and
courage (andreia).
5 That is, perhaps, from our corrupted nature, as Rom. 5.12-17 may imply. If so, this is the
only indication that Constantine knew a doctrine of the fall.
6 This sentence seems to conflate the Stoic position, that the virtuous will is free and the
only good, with the doctrine of Christianity and Plato that the gods reward our actions after
death. The relation between providence and fate is a leading theme of Chalcidius’ On the
Timaeus of Plato (see p. 14 n. 4); at 176-77 he concludes that providence is the will of God
which acts as the mind of the world, while fate is the system of natural law sustained by the
world soul.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
which is proper to God in his providence, but from fortune or chance?* Eor
it depends on the manner of people’s lives and their deserts; the plagues and
dissensions, scarcity or abundance which attend them manifestly and openly
declare, all but speaking, that such are the corollaries of our lives.
For creation^ rejoices in righteous actions and rejects all impiety and
welcomes the modest cast of mind. At the same time it abhors audacity and
boastfulness that exceeds the condition of the living being. If the proofs of
this, for the most part, are clear and lie before our eyes, they none the less
shine forth more manifestly whenever, collecting ourselves inwardly and, as
it were concentrating our minds,^ we consider the cause of them within
ourselves. For this reason I say we ought to live modestly and decently, not
raising our thoughts above nature, and always reflecting on the constant
presence to us of the God who oversees all that we do. The truth of the claim
that all things arose from fortune and chance should be tested in this way
also.'* Heavens and the stars, earth and sea, fire and winds, water and air, the
vicissitude of the seasons, the periodicity of winter and summer - should
one be persuaded that all these arose without reason and just as it chanced to
occur, rather than being fashioned? For some who have no minds say that
human beings thought out most of these things because of their own needs,^
nature supplying everything without stint. Grant that there is something
reasonable in this opinion as applied to what is earthly and destructible: are
the immortal and immutable things then also a human invention? For the
progenitor of all these and their like, whatever is divorced from our senses
and apprehensible by mind alone, is not the human being, a creature of
matter, but the intellectual and eternal essence of God.
Yes indeed, the very principle of order is the work of providence, in that
the day shines forth illuminated by the sun, and when it wanes night
succeeds it, but having succeeded it is not left utterly dim because of the
1 Cf. Origen, First Principles 3.1.5. The argument was trite, as Alexander of Aphrodisias,
On Fate 25-27 reveals.
2 The Greek word is ousia, ‘being’ or ‘substance’, but probably here rendering Latin natura.
3 Aphrase that savours of Platonism: cf. Porphyry, Plotinus 8.21-23 and Plotinus, Enneads
1.4.9.
4 The following argument is reminiscent of Lactantius, DI 7.3.2.5, but also, as Bolhuis
(1956), 29-30 shows, of many other passages.
5 No-one can have held such a preposterous tenet regarding the elements and the seasons;
Constantine appears to have in mind the Euhemeristic theory that the gods of myth were
originally the humans who invented such useful arts as writing, weaving and agriculture. On
this cf. Lactantius, DI 1.14.
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THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
II
ballet of the stars.' What is one to say of the moon which is full when it
stands in direct opposition to the sun, and grows slender on its approach to it
at close quarters?^ Does not this reveal the indwelling reason^ and sagacity
of God? The ready action of the sun’s flame in maturing crops, the winds
that blow to bring good climate, the refreshing rain and the harmony of all
these, whereby all things are disposed with reason and order, and the eternal
dispensation whereby the planets return to the same place at the due and
expected times'* - is it not manifest that God determines this, that the stars
perform perfect service in obedience to the divine law? The altitude of the
mountains and the hollow depths of the valleys and the evenness of the
spreading plains - do these seem to exist without God’s providence? Not
only is the sight of these delightful, but the use is delightful also. The
measures and intervals of water and earth, sufficing both for agriculture and
for the importing of necessities from elsewhere - how do these not prove the
accurate and calculated forethought of God? For the mountains contain
water, then the smooth receives this and when it has irrigated itself
sufficiently for recovery, discharges the rest into the sea, and the sea in turn
passes it on to the Ocean. And shall we still dare to say that all this happens
by chance and fortuitously? We have still to show what shape or form
characterizes chance, which has no substance, either intelligible or sensible,
but is just the noise of an insubstantial name buzzing about the ears.
7. For chance is in truth the name uttered by persons whose thoughts are
haphazard and irrational^ and who, failing themselves to comprehend the
rationale, believe through the weakness of their comprehension that those
1 Cf. Ps. 147.4 on the creation of stai's; Job 38.7 on their songs; Plato, Timaeus 40c for the
stellar dance, translated chorea by Chalcidius, On the Timaeus 123. Mai'kschies (2000), 5 styles
this a pagan motif when he encounters it in the Theophany of Eusebius (c. 333), but cf. Origen,
On Prayer 7.
2 A fact discovered as early as the fifth century, according to Heath (1913), 79-80, who cites
the Christian author Hippolytus {Refutation 1.1.8) on Anaxagoras. Some authors (e.g.
Lucretius, Nature of Things 5.575-6) continued to doubt the dependence of the moon’s light on
the sun.
3 The Greek is endiathetos logos, identified in Chapter 10 with Christ. For Christ as
Wisdom see 1 Cor. 1.21-23, Heb. 1.3 (by implication), drawing onProv. 8.22 and Wis. 7.25-26.
4 Cf. the emperor’s reasoning at Constantine 2.57—58.
5 Cf. Eusebius, Constantine 2.56, where the context once again implies a contrast between
the steadfastness of nature and the aberrations of the human mind.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
things for which they cannot give an answer are irrationally ordered.'
Nevertheless in the case of certain things the true comprehension of the truth
about them lies in the depths; these are things that have a marvellous nature,
as is the case with the nature of hot waters. Eor no-one has a ready account
of the cause of such a great fire, and it is marvellous that when entirely
surrounded hy cold water, it does not depart from its native heat.^ These
phenomena, however, seem rather rare, and are easily enumerated through¬
out the inhabited world. My conviction is that they are intended to make the
power of providence^ become easily recognizable to humankind, declaring
that the two most contrary natures, heat and cold, are filtered through one
and the same root. Many and innumerable, therefore, are the contributions of
the higher power to human comfort and enjoyment, and especially the fruit
of the olive and the vine,"* one of which conduces to the recovery of spirit and
gladness, the other likewise to bodily enjoyment and therapy. An outstand¬
ing marvel also is the continual and inexhaustible flow of rivers by night and
day, a symbol of everflowing and inexhaustible life.^ Of equal weight is the
alternation of night.
8. So let us make these statements as a confirmation that nothing occurs
without mind or reason, and that reason and providence are God. It is he also
who has decreed that the service of metals shall supply our needs. He
deposited in due measure the nature of bronze and gold and the rest, decree¬
ing that those which were to be widely and variously used should be
furnished liberally, whereas those which were only for the purpose of orna¬
ment and liberality [he supplied] at once magnanimously® and sparingly,
somewhere between parsimony and prodigality.^ Eor if the same liberal
1 The Stoics would have agreed that chance is hidden cause: see Sambursky (1959), 56.
Chalcidius, On the Timaeus 159 adopts the classic definition of chance {fortuna) as the
unforeseen concurrence of two processes which in themselves are not extraordinary. See
Chalcidius, ed. Waszink (1962) ad loc. for a collection of Platonic and Aristotelian antecedents.
2 Lane Fox (1986), 645 traces Constantine’s interest in subterranean fires to Trier, citing
Latin Panegyrics 6.22.2. But Seneca, On Providence 1 reveals the triteness of this example.
3 Constantine’s writings are marked by a profound belief in the mle of providence: see e.g.
Constantine 2.68, where he is once again addressing the Christian clergy.
4 Cf. Ps. 104.15 on wine and oil. Both ancient and modern authorities hold that the culture
of vines and olives by the shores of the Mediterranean was coterminous with the spread of
civilization: Sallares (1991), 32-33.
5 For the association of life with rivers cf. Ezek. 47.1, John 7.37-39, Rev. 22.1 etc.
6 Cf. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.39 on the magnanimitas of God, with my note on the
recurrence of the term in Chapter 11.
7 Cf. Job 28.1-2 on God’s concealment of metals.
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THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
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provision were made of articles created only for ornament, avarice would
prompt those who mine metals to despise the ones that are useful for
agriculture, building and the construction of ships, such as iron and bronze;
they would neglect to amass them, taking more thought for those that
conduce to luxury and useless excess of wealth.' For this reason they say
that the discovery of gold and silver is more difficult and laborious than that
of other metals, so that the intensity of desire may be balanced by the
intensity of labour. And how many other works of divine providence can be
numbered in respect of all those things that it has liberally given to us,
openly exhorting human lives to temperance and all the other virtues, and
leading them away from untimely avarice. To trace the principle behind this
is a superhuman task, for how could the intellect of the corrupt and feeble
creature attain to the exact truth? How could it comprehend the pure will of
God from the beginning?^
9. Therefore we must apply ourselves to what is possible and in accordance
with our nature. For the inquiries that take place in disputations have a
plausibility that leads most of us away from the truth about what exists. This
has befallen many of the philosophers as they dabbled in words and the
investigation of the nature of what exists. For whenever the greatness of the
phenomena defeats their investigation they conceal the truth with certain
tortuous procedures. The consequence is that, for all their vaunted wisdom,
they hold contrary opinions and fight one another’s doctrines even though
they pretend to be wise.^ Hence arise popular rioting and harsh judicial
decisions from those in power, who believe that the ancestral custom is
being destroyed.'' Often the death of the philosophers themselves has
ensued. For Socrates,^ who exulted in dialectic and made the worse argument
1 Drake (2000), 281 accuses Constantine of overlooking the ‘laws of supply and demand’,
which entail that precious metals derive their value from their raiity. But as Pindar, Olympian 1.1-2
reminds us, the ancients profess to love gold because it is beautiful and not because it is scarce.
2 Cf. Rom. 11.3-5, Ps. 3.7-8
3 Both Clement of Alexandria {Stromateis 5) and Lactantius {Dl 3) had pressed this
argument at some length.
4 The usual pretext for Roman measures against Christianity was defence of ancestral
custom {mos maiorum). See e.g. the edict of Galerius in Lactantius, Pers. 34, and for the
Christian response see Minucius Felix, Octavius; Origen, Against Celsus 1; Arnobius, Against
the Nations passim.
5 Socrates (470-399 BC) was the tutor of Plato and a founder of the dialectic method in
philosophy, which aims at the claiification of belief as a precondition for the discovery of truth.
The claim that he made the worse argument the better is quoted from Aristophanes’ Clouds by
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
the better and trifled on every subject with contradictory arguments, was put
to death by the jealousy of his compatriots and fellow-citizens. Pythagoras,
who professed to cultivate outstanding temperance and silence, has been
convicted of falsehood.* Eor after his sojourn in Egypt, he declared to the
Italians as a personal revelation to himself from God the things that at a time
long before had been spoken by the prophets.^
And Plato himself,^ who excelled all others in gentleness and first
accustomed human intellects to revert from the sensible to the intelligible
and the things that are always thus, the one who taught us to look up to
things above, did well when he postulated the god above being, then made a
second subordinate to this one,'* dividing the two essences numerically,^
Diogenes Laertius, Lives 2.5. He was put to death on a charge of introducing new gods and
corrupting the young; his death was represented in the Apology and Phaedo as a martyrdom,
and Christian authors generally profess a high estimation for his character (Justin, 1 Apology 5;
Tertullian, Apology 14 and Martyrs 4). Only Lactantius, D1 3.19-20 speaks as scornfully as
Constantine.
1 Pythagoras of Samothrace was reputed to have lived around 500 BC and to have founded
communities in southern Italy, whose members were committed to ardent friendship, vegetar¬
ianism and the liberation of the immortal soul. On the celebrated silence of his followers see
lamblichus. On the Pythagorean Life 199.
2 On the travels of Pythagoras see Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras 11, though it is usually
Plato who is credited, on the weak authority of his own Timaeus, with plagiarism from Egyptian
sources. The claim that all Greek philosophy was derived from the barbarians was entertained
even by some classical authors, to the indignation of Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the
Philosophers, preface.
3 For the claim that Plato anticipates the gospel see Justin, lApology 8 and 60; for the view
that his understanding was insufficient see Origen, Against Celsus 6.43 etc. On the use of Plato
in the apologists, who admired above all his postulation of a unique and benevolent creator, see
Danielou (1961), 103-22. Lactantius (/>/3.20-21) and Amobius {Against the Nations 2.11) are
more hostile to the great philosopher than Constantine.
4 Following not so much Plato as Numenius, a disciple of both Plato and Pythagoras in the
mid-second centuiy AD, and a precursor of the Neoplatonists. See esp. Fragment 11 Des
Places, which may have its origin in the spurious second epistle of Plato. If Constantine did not
have first-hand knowledge of such passages (ours is in Eusebius, Gospel Preparation 11—12),
there may have been Latin sources. The commentary of the Christian Chalcidius on the Timaeus,
for example, is, as the edition of Waszink (1962) reveals, even more indebted to Numenius than
his use of his name suggests. Waszink accepts the conventional date of c. 400 AD, but Dillon
(1977), 401-08 and Barnes (1981) have argued that Chalcidius was a contemporary of
Constantine, who dedicated his work to Bishop Hosius of Cordova. The frequency with which
I draw on his commentary in my notes may add some weight to this position; nevertheless,
some other writer would have to have been the intermediary for the doctrine of two gods, to
which Chalcidius never alludes.
5 Cf. Justin, Trypho 129.5 on the differentiation of Father and Son.
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THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
15
while both shared one perfection and the essence of the second god'
received its concrete existence^ from the first. For the maker and governor of
the universe is clearly sublime, while the other after him, in submission to
his commandments, refers to him the cause of the constitution of all things.^
According to the exact account^ then, there would be one God who exercises
care over all things and takes thought for them, having set all things in order
by his Word. And the Word is himself God^ and the child of God,® for how
could anyone escape the greatest error, for how could anyone escape the
greatest error if he gave any other name than the appellation ‘child’? For the
1 Constantine does not apply the words ‘second god’ directly to Christ, but even if he did I
could not agree with Barnes (2001) in detecting an Arian tendency in this passage. Barnes,
who now dates the speech to 321, observes that the expression ‘second god’ was denounced as
an Arianizing blasphemy by Marcellus of Ancyra, while Marcellus’ principal adversary,
Eusebius of Caesarea, makes use of cognate terms. But Marcellus, if we judge by frequency
of condemnation, was the most intransigent heretic of his era, while Eusebius, whether
heterodox or orthodox, declined to be an Arian, as he could not find scriptural warrant for the
tenet that the Son was made ‘from nothing’. For him at least the notion of Christ as ‘second
god’ was authorized by Origen’s Against Celsus 6.61, where Origen’s aim is not to
subordinate the Second Person of the Trinity to the First, but to defend the application of the
title theos to both. The Nicene Council of 325 was likewise solicitous only to maintain that
Christ is God (against the Arians) and that none the less he is different from the Father
(against Marcellus); it made no attempt to determine whether one of them is superior in
dignity to the other.
2 For hypostasis as the concrete expression of essence or ousia, see Porphyry, Isagoge
18.25.
3 Cf. Numenius, Fr. 12 Des Places (Eusebius, Gospel Preparation 12.18.6-10). The
language of restoration is reminiscent of 1 Cor. 15.28 and Acts 3.21. On the orthodoxy of the
present passage see Edwards (1995).
4 The word for ‘account’ is logos. It is not clear whether Constantine means to assert that
this portion of Plato’s teaching is true or to contrast its imperfections with the more accurate
formulation offered by Christianity. On the Father’s government of the world through Christ cf.
Athenagoras, Embassy 10.4, following Prov. 8.22.
5 A clear affirmation of the position that was declared to be orthodox at the Nicene Council
of 325. It was only in 327 that Arius consented to call Christ God in the confession that he
submitted to Constantine. Unlike the emperor, he was prepared to apply the term ‘creature’ to
Christ, as he denied that he was Son in any sense that made him the product of the Father’s
nature rather than his will.
6 The Greek uses pais (‘boy’) rather than the more usual huios (‘son’). Although Acts 4.27
and 4.30 could be cited as a precedent, Ison (1987) suggests that the phrase alludes to the
honorific nomenclature of emperors in the age of Constantine. The formula Deus et Deifilius
appears in Tertullian, Apology 21 and Hermogenes 18. In the latter it is coupled with the title
verbum (‘Word’), with an allusion to, or even an erroneous Latin version of, John 1.1.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
father of all' would rightly also he called the father of his own Word.^ So far
then Plato was wise; hut in what follows he is found^ to err from the truth,
introducing a host of gods and assigning a form to each, which became a
pretext for greater error among the most unreasoning people, who did not
look towards the providence of the Most High, but worshipped images of
[the gods] which had been transformed into human types and those of other
creatures/ The result is that a nature and discipline which were excellent
and worthy of highest praise, mixed with such shortcomings, are in an
impure and defective state.
But the same man seems to have taken himself in hand and corrected his
errors, where he manifestly asserts that God has breathed into us his own
Word,^ clearly showing that the spirit of God is a rational soul® and at the
1 Although it savours of Timaeus 28c, this phrase is also warranted by Rom. 11.36 and
perhaps by Eph. 5.6, though there it may mean only that God is the father of all believers.
Danielou (1961) offers good reasons for supposing that the Greek apologists knew Timaeus 28c
from a florilegium, and it was certainly under Plato’s influence that early Christians began to
see God as the father of the world, not merely of his adopted nations, Israel and the Church. But
Rist (1981), 158 is probably right to argue that a more cautious speaker, after the Nicene
Council of 325 at least, would have taken pains to avoid the implication of this passage, that
Christ belongs to the Father in the same way as his creatures.
2 Perhaps a punning allusion to Plato, Symposium 177d, where the same phrase means
simply ‘author of the account or argument’. The passage implies that Christ is styled the logos
because he stands in the same relation to the Father as a spoken word to the one who utters it.
Origen, First Principles 1.24-26 rejected this position, maintaining that the title is confen'ed on
Christ as the architect and governor of the ordered universe. Arius appears to have embraced the
same view, to judge by the position of the word logos in his confession of 327.
3 If Constantine is alluding to the account of the lesser gods which follows that of the
creation at Timaeus 40d-41a, he would seem to be acquainted with the dialogue from some
other source than a florilegium. The translation of Cicero would have been available to him; so
perhaps would that of Chalcidius, on whom see p. 14 n. 4 above.
4 A standard topic of Jewish and Christian invective, from Isaiah 45 to Tertullian’s On
Idolatry. Though Plato himself had neither endorsed nor condemned the use of images.
Porphyry’s On Statues (known to us from Eusebius) justified the worship of the divine through
the material intermediaries appointed by tradition.
5 Conflating Gen. 2.7 with Timaeus 90a, and, in the manner of Tatian {Oration 7) and
Lactantius {D1 4.6), making no verbal distinction between the Spirit and the Word.
6 Curiously ignoring the distinction, already drawn by Tatian, Oration 12, between the soul
and the spirit more sublime than soul. Perhaps he has in mind Gen. 2.7 again, where Adam is
said to have become a rational soul when God breathed into his nostrils; he may also know that
Origen spoke of Christ as the soul of God at First Principles 2.8.5. Alternatively, he may be
indicating that the rational soul of Christ himself was identical with the Spirit, a doctrine not
without precedent in Rome: see Heine (1998) on the role of the Spirit in the Christology of the
Roman bishops, c. 200 AD. It would, however, be unsafe to hold the speaker to an exact
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THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
17
same time dividing all things into two kinds, the intelligible and the sensible,
one <simple and immaterial>,^ the other compounded from the structure of
the body, and one apprehensible to the mind, the other opinable with opinion
and sensation.^ Thus what partakes of the Holy Spirit, as being uncom¬
pounded and indissoluble, is eternal and has been allotted eternal life,
whereas the sensible, in every way dissoluble on the principle by which it
arose, has no share in eternal life. And, remarkably, he goes on to teach that
those who have lived well, obviously the souls of holy and good men, after
their departure from the body, are sanctified in the most beautiful parts of
heaven.^ Now this also is useful to life; for who, without believing him and
expecting the same good fortune, will practise the best life, righteousness
and discretion, and reject evil? And in keeping with these statements he
imposes on the souls of the wicked a wandering like that of people carried
about in a shipwreck in the streams of Acheron and Pyriphlegethon.'^
10 . There are, however, some whose intellects are so impaired that, when
they encounter these very facts, they are not converted and feel no dread, but
despise and ridicule them as though they were hearing invented fables.^ And
while they praise the versatility of expression, they reject the doctrine as a
hard one, they believe in poetic fables and they spread their trite and lying
words throughout the whole Greek and the whole barbarian world.® For the
interpretation of his words when Latin theology of his day applied the term spiritus, with little
discrimination, to the substance of the Godhead, the Third Person of the Trinity and the
incorporeal nature of Christ himself; see e.g. Lactantius, D/4.6.1 on Christ as spirit.
1 Following Heikel’s supplementation of the lacuna. For the distinction between the noetic
and the sensible, cf. Plato, Timaeus 27d. Biblical thought is content to contrast the visible and
transient with the unseen and eternal: 2 Cor. 4.18.
2 Cf. Plato, Republic 477c^78e.
3 Cf. Plato, Gorgias 524a, Phaedrus 247-48.
4 Cf. Plato, Phaedo 11 lc-114c, especially 11 le and 113d, which use images of sailing (and
in the first case may allude to the shipwreck of Odysseus between Scylla and Charybdis).
Acheron and Pyriphlegethon were rivers of the underworld in Greek mythology;
Pyriphlegethon is mentioned among the poets’ fables by Tertullian, Apology 47.
5 Though episodes of the Gospels were often likened to pagan myths (Justin, Trypho 67;
Tertullian, Apology 21 etc.; Lactantius, DI 1.9; Amobius, Against the Nations 1.54), the
doctrine of the afterlife appears to have been ignored in philosophical polemic. Had the Latin
poet Lucretius lived a century later, his ridicule of infernal terrors {On Nature 1.102-30) could
have been aimed at Christians as well as at his poetic predecessors.
6 Not that the author himself divides the world into Greeks and barbarians, but that fabulous
tales begin among the Greeks; cf. Lactantius, D/ 1.18 and Arnobius, Against the Nations 5.24.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
poets* say that children of the gods, human beings, judge souls after death,
hymning their judgments and legal decisions, and setting overseers over the
departed. The same poets^ set forth battles of the demons^ and certain
warlike practices, and speak of their fatal decrees, declaring that some are
harsh by nature, others indifferent to their tutelage of humankind, and
certain others malign. And they put them on stage,'* grieving over the
slaughter of their own children, as though incapable of aiding, not just
strangers, but even those dearest to them. And they represent them as subject
to human passions,^ singing their wars and wounds, their joys and griefs.®
And what they say is worthy of belief.’ Eor if it is by divine inspiration
that they address themselves to poetry, it is proper to trust them and believe
what they proclaim in their raptures.® Yet they tell of the sufferings of gods
and demons. These sufferings of theirs then are absolutely true. But someone
will say that it is possible for poets to lie,® since it is the property of poetry to
charm*** the souls of hearers, whereas truth is the case where what is spoken
of is no different from what it is said to be. Let it therefore be the property of
poetry sometimes to snatch away the truth; nevertheless those who lie do not
1 See e.g. Homer, Odyssey 11.568, cited ai Apology 41a etc. In view of the following note,
however, it is possible that Constantine found this lore in the Orphic poetry which is cited more
often than Homer in such Christian apologists as Tatian and Athenagoras.
2 The most obvious candidates here are the Orphic poets and Empedocles (Fr. 115 DKetc.).
See Origen, Against Celsus 6.42 on the archaic mythographer Pherecydes.
3 The word daimon signified in pagan usage a being intermediate between gods and men,
whether evil or benign; Constantine takes up the word in its Christian sense, which was always
pejorative.
4 Cf. Augustine, City of God 2.13. The seminal attack on tragedy as a form of art is Plato,
Republic 377 and 395-96, closely followed in the fourth century by such Christians as Basil of
Caesarea {On Reading Greek Literature 4), though neither Aristotle nor the Neoplatonists held
the same position.
5 The impassibility of God, i.e. his immunity to all extraneous influences, is an axiom of
Christian as of Platonic thought. As Lactantius, On the Anger of God, was at pains to show, it
does not exclude such voluntai'y dispositions as benevolence and philanthropy, of which more
is said below. On the sufferings of the gods see Teitullian, Apology 14-15.
6 The worship of warlike deities breeds strife on earth, as Chapters 22 and 25 will
demonstrate.
7 Plato, Timaeus 40d strikes the same note of irony; cf. Lactantius, D1 1.11.23.
8 See Plato, Ion and Phaedrus 245a-b on the ‘enthusiasm’ of the poets; Laws 682a draws
the corollary that Homer speaks the truth.
9 A privilege already claimed by Hesiod, or his Muses, at Theogony 27.
10 Poetry is commonly represented as a species of enchantment (goeteia): Plato, Republic
383a etc.
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THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
19
lie without purpose. For they either do this for some profit and advantage, or
conscious of some evil practice in themselves, they dissemble because of the
penalty imposed by the laws.* For it was possible for them, in my opinion,
not to spread lying and impious reports about the higher nature in contra¬
diction of the truth.
11 . If therefore anyone knows that he is unworthy of the good life because
he has lived in licence and disorder, if he changes and looks to God, the eye
of his soul being purified, and becomes a stranger to his former base course
of life, receiving God’s healing,^ he will live for all eternity. And it is fitting
to give thanks on this account to the God who has saved him and saves all.^
And they would be saved with fewer pains if they accepted the healing of
their souls with pure faith and did not vacillate, like people who sometimes
entrust themselves to medications and turn away, but endured with noble
fortitude the remedy of righteousness, discretion and the rest.'* Let us for our
part strive to fill the uninitiated^ with the good hope® that is in such words,
calling God to our aid in the endeavour. For it is no small work to have
turned to piety the souls of those who hear us, should they happen to be
good, and if they be evil and ignorant, to lead them to the opposite course,
rendering them profitable instead of good for nothing.’ Rejoicing indeed in
these same endeavours, and thinking it the work of a good man to hymn the
1 Alluding again to the persecution of freethinkers by the Athenians and Romans.
2 Christ was regularly described as a physician (Mark 2.17; Ignatius, Eph. 7.2 etc.), but here
there may be also an ironic recollection of Lucretius, On the Nature of Things 1.936-50, where
Lucretius undertakes to administer the drug of poetry to those who are deceived by the puerile
teaching of the poets.
3 Not a confession of universalism, but an echo of the Pauline doctrine (1 Cor. 15.22, Rom.
5.18) that Christ died for the salvation of all humanity.
4 Another enumeration of the cardinal virtues, faith perhaps standing in the place of wisdom
as at Heb. 11.3.
5 Greek amuetos, meaning one who is not admitted to the mysteries (see note to Chapter 2).
Constantine’s son Constantins used the term to signify those who were not baptized (Theodoret,
Church History 3.3), but Constantine cannot mean this, as he was not himself baptized at the
time of speaking. Notwithstanding the precedent of Tertullian, To the Nations 1.7, Latin
Christianity preferred the term sacramentum, and only after Constantine did legislation begin to
discriminate between the ‘mysteries’ of the faith and pagan cults {Theodosian Code 10.8.19
etc.).
6 On faith as a source of hope amid tribulation cf. Constantine at Eusebius, Constantine
2.26.1.
7 Perhaps a reminiscence of Philemon 11, though if so it was not detected by the Greek
translator.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
Saviour, I dismiss all that the base sway of fortune^ imposed on my unfor¬
tunate predicament, reckoning repentance the most efficacious salvation. I
fervently wish that this revelation had been granted to me long ago,^ if
indeed the man is blessed who has been brought up from infancy^ gladdened
in the knowledge of things divine and in the beauty of virtue. And let this be
said with moderation, for even if, as people say, it is not from earliest youth
or from the cradle that the good are wise,'^ it is none the less a welcome thing
if they achieve wisdom even in the prime of youth.
In me, however, no human education ever gave me assistance, but God is
the source of whatever gifts of character or conduct are of good report
among people of understanding.^ I possess, and as it were hold before every
vicious expedient that the evil one contrives, no weak shield,® but the
knowledge of what pleases God. So choosing from this what is profitable to
the present argument I shall hymn the Father of all.’ And do you come to
assist my zeal for holiness, Christ saviour of all, and set in order my
description of your virtue, leading the way in solemn speech. And let no-one
expect to hear my words and vocables adorned with any cunning;® for well I
1 As Plutarch, On the Fortune of Alexander and On the Fortune of the Romans, reminds us,
conquerors have always been apt to see themselves as the favourites of fortune. By contrast the
private person in antiquity often regarded himself as the plaything of a cruel mistress, and a
religious conversion might be represented, as by Apuleius, Metamorphoses 11, as an escape
from her dominion to that of a more benign and potent deity. Though Fortune resumed her
throne in the Middle Ages, a more careful theologian of the Constantinian era would have taken
heed of authors such as Origen, Against Celsus 8.65 and refused to surrender even the lives of
pagans to any overseer but God.
2 Notwithstanding the memorable piety of his mother Helena during his reign, and the
laxity of his father Constantins in enforcing Diocletian’s edict (Eusebius, Constantine 2.49.1
etc.), Constantine does not seem to have been raised a Christian. Eusebius, Tricennial 9 avers
that he was self-taught before entering Rome under the sign of the Cross. At Constantine 1.17
he makes Constantins a monotheist, though Smith (1997) finds little evidence of the ‘solar
monotheism’ that is commonly ascribed to Constantins by modem scholars. It is not clear what
Eusebius means by saying at Constantine 1.27 that Constantine had elected to return to his
paternal god; if this were the god of Christians, how could Constantine have been still
unacquainted with the cross at Constantine 1.32?
3 Cf. 2Tim. 3.15.
4 The implication of e.g. Wis. 7.Iff.
5 Cf. Gal. 1.1 on the origin of Paul’s apostolate.
6 At Eph. 6.16 Christians are exhorted to oppose the wicked with the shield of faith. But
Constantine may also be alluding to the occasion when he ordered that the cross should be
inscribed on the shields of his troops.
7 See Chapter 1 and the concluding prayer to Christ.
8 Cf. 2 Cor. 2.1 for another disclaimer of eloquence, with my note on Chapter 2.
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THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
21
know that people of intelligence abhor the abandoned ranting that aims only
at pleasure, when the speakers are more concerned with applause than with
discretion in speech.
Now there are some thoughtless and impious people who say that our
Christ^ was punished by justice and that the cause of life to those who live
was himself deprived of life.^ It is no marvel that people who have once
dared to act impiously should not be afraid to hide their wickedness, but it
passes all foolishness that they seem to have persuaded themselves that the
indestructible God has been vanquished by human beings, or that savagery
could have prevailed over love of humankind.^ Instead they should reflect
that that which is magnanimous'' and long-suffering cannot be turned aside
by insult or robbed of its natural rigour by abuse; rather that nature always
<prevails>,^ breaking the savagery of its attackers through the counsel of its
reason and magnanimity.
For God, in his love of humankind, elected to wipe out unrighteousness
and to exalt propriety and righteousness. For this reason, having gathered
together the wisest of men,® he set out the supremely fine and profitable
doctrine that the good and happy should emulate his own providential care
for the world. What greater good could anyone name than this, that God
should give a crown to righteousness and make those worthy of his education
resemble himself, so that as goodness was distributed to all people, well-
1 ‘Our’ may imply that the veneration of Christ is the distinguishing mark of Christians (cf.
Aristides, Apology 15.1), or stress that (in contrast with pagan deities and the Jahweh of the
Jews) he is not only the Lord but the Saviour of his people (cf. Titus 2.13, Ignatius, Ephesians
proem etc.).
2 Justin, 1 Apology 30 and Amobius, Against the Nations 1.51 record that Christ was
charged by some with sorcery, a capital offence.
3 Rendering philanthrdpia, an ideal of Stoic philosophers and Hellenistic monarchs, which
was transferred to God by Justin, lApology 10 and Origen, Homilies on Ezekiel 1.1 and 6.10.
See Osborne (1994), 164-84 on philanthropy as an attribute of God; Eusebius, Constantine
2.53 on Constantine’s profession of the same virtue. Drake (2000), 384—92 shows that the
vocabulary of Hellenistic literature on the good king is pervasive in Eusebius’ panegyric on
Constantine.
4 The Greek word megalopsukhia implies at Aristotle, Ethics 1123b a proper estimate of
one’s merits, but is used in Christian literature to signify generosity (Chrysostom, Homily 19.4
on 2 Corinthians) and is attributed in this sense to Constantine himself by Eusebius,
Constantine 2.2. God the Father is credited with magnanimitas in the Latin translation of
Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.39.
5 As Heikel notes, at least one word is missing.
6 Meaning the apostles, perhaps the children of wisdom at Matt. 11.19, notwithstanding
their lack of education (Acts 5.13).
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
being should abound for humankind to all eternity? This is the solemn
victory, this the greatest work and the rule of discretion that brings harmony
to all peoples. And the victory-tokens of all these we give to you with
blessings, O Saviour of all.^ But as for you, wicked and abominable
blasphemy, puffed up with lying statements and declarations, you deceive
infants, persuade boys and such men as follow boyish habits,^ leading them
away from the worship of the true God^ and setting up factitious statues for
their prayers and homage, so that having been deceived they await the
wages'* of their own insensibility.^ Eor they blame the author of all goods,®
Christ, God and child of God.
Is not then this the God who is duly revered hy the most percipient and
intelligent nations and peoples,^ exalted above all power and rising above all
goodness?® It is a cause of greater praise, an outstanding marvel, that he has
not availed himself of his great power to requite the insult, but has forgiven
humans for their foolish thoughts, reckoning folly and error intrinsic to
humanity, while himself abiding by his own decision® and abating not a jot
of his natural love for humankind. Away with you, impious ones (for this
command is laid on you on account of your incorrigible sin*°) to the
1 Cf. 1 Tim. 2.3-5; the dedication of spoils to Christ resembles the Roman practice of
consecrating the spolia opima to Jupiter. Eisner (1998), 187-88 contends that Constantine
carried this practice further by spoiling the monuments of his pagan countrymen to adorn his
arch.
2 Cf. Plato. Republic 466b, but Constantine is probably alluding to the notorious pederasty
of Socrates.
3 The title used of the Father at John 17.3 and of the Son at 1 John 5.20.
4 Death, as at Rom. 6.23.
5 The idolater shares the properties of his idol, as at Isa. 44.18.
6 Cf. 1 Chron. 29.14, John 1.3, Col. 1.16. The accolade can be transferred to Christ because
he is the one through whom all things were created.
7 Meaning above all the Jews, whose elevated monotheism was praised, e.g. by Lucan, Civil
Wars 2.592-93 and Numenius, Fr. 57 Des Places. Cf. Justin Martyr, lApology 5 for the
contention that among the barbarians those who lived by reason were Christians.
8 In common with other Christians (e.g. Origen, Against Celsus 7.42), Constantine affirms
that God’s sublimity cannot be measured even by the loftiest terms in Plato; here he alludes to
Republic 509b, where the Good is said to transcend even being in its dignity.
9 Perhaps the promise to Noah at Gen. 9.15-17, cited at Isa. 55.9; cf. Rom. 3.24-25 on
God’s forbearance in the days of sin.
10 Cf. Rom. 1.24, where the punishment of sinners is to be given up to sin. Drake (2000),
303 proposes that ‘a secondary purpose of the Oration to the Saints was to argue in favour of a
diversity of belief’. Surely it is evident that Constantine was a rigid partisan in the advocacy of
his own religion, even if he did not believe that he had to be a persecutor to be an honest
Christian.
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THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
23
slaughter of nations* and sacrifices, your revelry and feasting and carous¬
ing,^ as you profess to offer worship while you devise unbridled pleasures
and debaucheries, and pretend to make sacrifice while you are in thrall to your
own pleasures.^ Eor you do not know any good, nor the first commandment
of the great God, who gave laws to the human race and committed the
government of their lives to his child so that those who lived rightly and with
discretion should, according to his child’s judgment,'* obtain a second life
that was good and happy.
I have rehearsed therefore the doctrine of God about the way of life for
humankind, not indeed ignorantly, like the many, nor from conjecture or
guessing. But perhaps someone might say, whence comes the appellation
‘child’, what sort of birth [was it], if there is only one God and this one is a
stranger to all intercourse?^ In fact one ought to conceive the birth as
double,® first the familiar one by parturition, then the other from an eternal
cause, the rationale^ of which was furnished by the prescience of God and is
also clear to any person who is dear to him. For anyone who is wise will
know the cause of the ordering of the whole. Since now nothing is without
cause, the cause of existent things will necessarily exist before them. Since
then there is a world and things within it, and a power that keeps them safe,
the Saviour will necessarily exist before them all. Hence Christ is the cause
of salvation, but the saving of existent things is what is caused, just as the
Father is the cause of the Son, but the Son is the one caused.^
1 This taunt is directed either to barbarians, or (if Constantine is not yet the sole ruler of the
Empire) to pagans who are still capable of waging war in the east.
2 On the immorality of pagan festivals cf. Tertullian, Apology 15.7, 17.5, 35.2.
3 A hopeless attempt at the grand style, which Eusebius, had he forged this speech, would
have bettered at least by hinting at a law against sacrifices, as at Constantine 2.45. The earliest
law to proscribe all sacrifices in the Theodosian Code was introduced by the son of Constantine,
Constantins {Code 16.10.2). Salzman (1993) is one of many who doubt that Constantine passed
such a law, which would surely have precluded the toleration implied at Constantine 2.56, as
well as the special measures described at Constantine 3.54-55 and Tricennial 8. Supporters of
Eusebius’ testimony include Optatus, Against the Donatists 2.15; Origin of Constantine 34 in
Lieu and Montserrat (1996), 38; Barnes (1981), 220-21. If this speech is as early as I suggest,
this passage merely shows that Constantine had no choice but to tolerate pagan rituals in the
first years of his reign.
4 On Christ as Judge see John 5.21-27, Rom. 2.16 etc.
5 In contrast to the generated gods of pagan myth in Chapter 4.
6 A thoroughly orthodox position, anticipated by Ignatius, Trallians 7.2, Lactantius, DI
4.12-13 and the so-called ‘Roman Creed’ reconstructed by Kelly (1972), 102-03.
7 Playing on the term logos, which is sometimes the title ‘Word’.
8 Again very far from heresy; cf. Basil, Against Eunomius 1.25.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
His pre-existence has now, I think, been sufficiently established.^ But
how did he come down to humankind and the earth?^ The motive for
descent, as the prophets foretold, is care for the whole, for the maker will
necessarily care for his works.^ But, as he was going to approach a
mundane body and tarry on earth, he contrived for himself a sort of spurious
birth^ as need required, for there was conception without marriage and
childbearing by pure virginity, and God’s mother^ was a maid,® and there
was a temporal origin of an eternal nature,’ and perception of an intellectual
being and matter for an incorporeal epiphany.® The rest too was consonant
with the appearance: a radiant dove came flying from the ark of Noah and
settled in the virgin’s lap.® Consonant too was what followed these
intangible nuptials, purer than all chastity and greater than lordship itself:
the Wisdom of God from the cradle,^® and the reverent reception of him by
the Jordan which was the provider of ablutions.^* Add to this the royal
1 According to Eusebius, as quoted by Athanasius, On the Councils 33.16, this teaching was
repeated at the Council of Nicaea, where Constantine averred that Christ had been eternally
present to the Father in potential, and only subsequently brought forth in act.
2 A question put by pagan controversialists: Origen, Against Celsus 4.15.
3 Cf. Hos. 11.1^, Isa. 55.4-11 etc.
4 A bold phrase, perhaps alluding to Plato’s depreciation of matter at Timaeus 52a.
5 Heikel, following Schultze (1894), brackets this phrase, which is not attested in any Greek
author of the fourth century. Wright (1991) suggests that it is a caique upon some Latin title
such as dei genetrix, and thus a clue to the original language of the speech.
6 Cf. Matt. 1.23, interpreting Isa. 7.14. The Greek term in the present passage is kore rather
than parthenos, perhaps because the translator was usurping a pagan title, which belonged not
only to the Greek Persephone when she was worshipped at the Eleusinian mysteries, but also,
according to Epiphanius, Panarion 51, to the mother of the god Aion or eternity in Alexandria.
7 Not a Eusebian phrase, but fully consonant with the Nicene declaration of 325 that Christ
is from the essence of the Father.
8 For similarly picturesque variations on the virgin birth see Tertullian, Apology 21; he
doubts whether even God can be strictly incoiporeal {On the Flesh of Christ 11.2), but
Lactantius, DI 1.7 accepts this as an axiom, if only because God has no need to propagate his
own species. Lactantius had been anticipated by Tatian, Oration 25.2. A more accurate writer
than Constantine would, like Justin, lApology 63.16, have contrasted the incorporeal
apparitions to the patriarchs with the assumption of flesh in the reign of Augustus.
9 At Luke 1.35 a visitation of the Holy Spirit is foretold; for the equation of this with the
dove at Gen. 8.9-12 cf. Hilary of Poitiers, On the Mysteries 14.
10 In contrast to the proverb that no-one is wise from birth; cf. Athanasius, Against the
Arians 3.51.
11 Constantine may be thinking of the deference shown to Jesus by John the Baptist at Matt.
3.11-14 and pai'allels. The Jordan owes its reputation to this episode and to Elisha’s cleansing
of Naaman in 2 Kings 5.
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THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
25
anointing,' of a piece with his knowledge of all things,^ his manner of edu¬
cating and the power which accomplished miracles and healed the unheal-
able,^ the speedy and unobstructed confirmation of his human prayers,and
generally his entire life which passed the human measure, his teaching
which imparted not cleverness but wisdom, since those who frequented him
learned not the so-called political virtues,^ but the paths which lead to the
intellectual world, as they labour for the vision of that order which never
changes and are trained for the comprehension of the supreme Father.®
Nor was there any measure in his acts of benevolence. Instead of
blindness there was sight, instead of paralysis health, instead of death
resurrection to life.^ For I leave aside the unstinting provision of necessities
in the wilderness, and the fact that a little field repeatedly yielded every
kind of abundance to large crowds.* This thanks I give you according to my
ability, Christ our God and Saviour,® the supreme providence of the great
God, because you save us from evils and teach us the most blessed teach¬
ing - yes, it is not as praise but as thanks that I say these things.'" After all,
who being human could hymn you as is due? For you are said to have
brought forth things that are from what was not," to have kindled light for
1 Presumably the descent of the Spirit at Christ’s baptism (Matt. 3.17 and parallels), where
the Father echoes his words to the king at Ps. 2.7. The psalm is quoted exactly at Acts 13.3 and
Heb. 1.5. The name Christ means ‘the anointed one’, and is applied to priests, kings and
prophets in the scriptures; Constantine’s own royal status may not be far from his mind.
2 See especially John 2.24 and 18.4. By contrast, Mark 13.32 implies that the earthly Christ
was ignorant of some things, and this text was adduced by ‘Arians’ as a proof that he lacked the
omniscience of the true god: Basil, Epistle 236 etc.
3 On the difference between Christ’s miracles, effected by his sovereign word, and the
machinations of pagan sorcerers, see Amobius, Against the Nations 1.48.
4 See e.g. John 12.28 and Mark 7.34-35.
5 On these, the ordinary virtues, see Plato, Republic 427e—434d; Plotinus, Enneads
1.2.1.16; Porphyry, Sententiae 32. Porphyry lists four categories: political, purificatory,
intellectual, paradigmatic.
6 For contemplation as the end of the Christian life cf. 1 Cor. 13.12; 1 John 3.2; Origen, First
Principles 1.4.1.
7 See e.g. John 9.1-7; Mark 2.1-10; John 11.1—46 etc.
8 See e.g. Matt. 14.14-21; Mark 8.19-20; John 6.1-14.
9 Cf. Titus 2.13 for the formula.
10 Cf. again Origen, On Prayer 15, rejecting prayers of adoration, but not prayers of
thanksgiving, addressed to Christ. The reason offered by Origen, however, is the inferiority of
the Son to the Father, not the inadequacy of human speech.
11 See Heb. 11.3, where faith informs us that God created the world. The Greek phrase ex
ouk ofiton may mean either out of nothing or out of formless matter; in Latin ex nihilo can mean
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
them' and to have given order hy regulation and measure to the irregular
confusion of the elements. But the outstanding mark of your love for
humankind is that you made those of good nature emulous of the divine
and blessed life, and took thought that, becoming merchants of true goods,^
they should give to more people a share of your wisdom and good fortune,
procuring for themselves the eternal fruit of virtue;^ that, freed from
incontinence and partaking of love for humankind, with miseries before
their eyes but the shield of faith before them,"* they should embrace faith
and every kind of virtue, which the former way of life had cast out of the
human character. This life had been the cause, or rather necessity, for the
descent of the Saviour who exercises providence over all. Eor there had
been found no doctor^ of the requisite skill for such great evils and the
unrighteousness which prevailed over that life.
Now when that providence reached things here, it easily put in order
whatever had been disordered by overweening and incontinence. And it did
not do even this secretly, for it knew that, while some people were contem¬
plating its power with intelligence and reason, others, as if resembling
irrational creatures, were estimating nature rather by their senses. Eor this
reason, so that no-one, whether virtuous or weak, should be in doubt, he
brought his bountiful and marvellous healing into the open before their eyes,
restoring life for a second time to those whose lives had ceased, and bidding
those deprived of their senses to have them restored to health. And when he
stilled the sea, ordained calm after storm,® then, after having completed his
marvellous works and summoned human beings from faithlessness to sturdy
faith, flew back up to heaven^ - whose work was this but that of God and his
pre-eminent power?®
only ‘from absolutely nothing’. Cf. Tertullian, Hermogenes 18-20, where Christ rather than
matter is said to be the origin of creation at Gen. 1.1; on the triumph of this doctrine in the
Church of the late second century see May (1994), 148-78.
1 Cf. Matt. 4.16, John 9.5 etc.
2 Cf. Matt. 13.45—46, the parable of the merchant and the pearl.
3 Cf. Heb. 12.11 on the ‘peaceable fruit of righteousness’.
4 Eph. 6.16 again.
5 See Matt. 9.12 etc.
6 See Matt. 8.26 and parallels.
7 On the ascension see Acts 1.9, John 20.17, Eph. 4.10. Here it is combined with the soul’s
recovery of its wings in Plato’s Phaedrus 256b-d, to which Justin alludes at Trypho 2.5.
8 Christ himself is the power of God at 1 Cor. 1.24, but Constantine appears to make the
distinction adumbrated in Origen’s Commentary on John 14.28.
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THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
27
Not even was the time close to his suffering a stranger to these
marvellous sights, when night, veiling the light of day, made the sun
disappear.' Eor dread fell upon the peoples everywhere, that the consumma¬
tion of all things had come, and that chaos was about to prevail like that
before the regulation of the world.^ And the cause of such a great evil was
sought for, and whether human beings had committed some licentious act
towards the divine until, in his gentle magnanimity, disdaining the insults of
the impious, he restored^ the heaven, adorning the whole of it with the ballet
of the stars.'' And no less indeed did the blear-eyed^ aspect of the world
return to its proper brilliance.
12 . But one who is prone to blasphemy® will say that being God he was able
to improve and mollify the natural impulses of humanity. What method then
could be more effective, what attempt more likely to succeed in making the
evil ones see wisdom, than his own appeal. Was not he himself present and
visible to teach the well-ordered way of life? If then the proclamation of God
when present had no success, what good could he have done when absent
1 Matt. 27.45 and parallels. The next sentence implies that the darkness covered the world,
not merely ‘the land’, as most translators of the biblical text maintain. If Origin, Against Celsus
2.33 can be trusted, the Greek historian Phlegon described convulsions at this time exceeding
those reported in any of the gospels.
2 As Mark 13.25 etc. would suggest. ‘Chaos’ is here bon'owed from the poets (e.g. Ovid,
Metamorphoses 1.7 after Hesiod, Theogony 116) a name for the state of formlessness {tohu
bohu) described in Gen. \.2;foYtohu bohu come again cf. Jer. 4.23. Mic. 1.6andZech. 14.4in
the Septuagint use the term chaos of the state to which God threatens to reduce Israel after
repeated disobedience, and the Roman (though Greek-speaking) author Hippolytus, On the
World locates chaos in the underworld. Lactantius, D1 2.9 alludes to the Hesiodic usage, but
insists that even chaos cannot antedate the beginning of creation; Chalcidius, On the Timaeus
122 identifies chaos with matter, which he believes to be a creation of God.
3 The restoration (apokatastasis) of all things, promised in Acts 3.21, is a frequent theme of
Christian literature, e.g. Justin, Trypho 134.4; OhgQn, Against Celsus 3.1.15. But some (e.g.
Nemesius, On the Nature of Man 35) were also familiar with the Stoic doctrine that successive
worlds were engendered by a constant alternation of destruction and apokatastasis. Plato held
{Timaeus 39d) that all the stars and planets return periodically to the same alignments;
Chalcidius in his paraphrase of this theory seems to echo the diction of Virgil, Eclogue 4.5, cited
below at Chapter 19.
4 At Job 38.7 the stars sing; at Plato, Timaeus 40c they dance - or rather both are implied by
the Greek word choros, but only the motion is perceptible to mortals. See further p. 11 n. 1 above.
5 Possibly an allusion to Gen. 40.7, where Joseph (an acknowledged type of Christ) is
restored to the brothers who thought that he was dead.
6 Perhaps thinking of the second-centuiy heretic Marcion, who imputed the creation to a
deity who was just but not good, inferior to the Father of Jesus Christ.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
and unheard? What obstacle therefore arose against the most blessed teach¬
ing? The perversity of human beings.' Eor whenever we take offence at what
is well and aptly proclaimed, then the sobriety of the intellect is debauched.
What matter that they were inclined to neglect the decrees and to offer their
ears reluctantly to the laws that had been laid down?^ Eor if they had not
ignored it, they would have had the due reward for their attention, both
immediately and for the next life, which is life in the true sense. Eor indeed
the reward of obeying God is incorruptible and eternal life,^ which can be
claimed as the due of those who know God and those who offer their own
lives as an object of emulation, and as it were an eternal paradigm to those
who have chosen the life of struggle."'
For this reason then the teaching was imparted to the wise, so that
whatever these proclaim may be carefully maintained with inward purity by
those who heed it, and the observance of God’s command may be true and
sure. For from this grows also fearlessness in the face of death through pure
faith and absolute holiness with respect to God; and it withstands the
tempests of the world with the irresistible <strength>^ of divine virtue,
fenced round for martyrdom.® And when it has overcome the greatest fears
through magnanimity, it is deemed worthy of the crown’ by the one for
whom it bore an honourable martyrdom.* And it has no pride, for it knows
1 See e.g. Isa. 59.2, Rom. 1.18-20.
2 See e.g. Jer. 44.4; Ezek. 20.24; Rom. 3.7-20.
3 See Wis. 2.23, 1 Cor. 15.50 on incoiniption; John 6.68 on eternal life.
4 Although Deut. 30.16-20 promises life to those who keep the Law, and Jesus (Matt. 5.20)
makes righteousness a condition of entering heaven, eternal life is generally held by apostolic
authors to be contingent on faith in Jesus (John 3.16 etc.). While the law is not abrogated (Rom.
3.31), and we are still required to imitate Christ’s obedience (Phil. 2.5-9), faith makes us
beneficiaries of his death, which at the same time atones for and diminishes our continuing
propensity to sin (Rom. 6.1-8.4). Even the New Testament (James 2, Heb. 11) insists that faith
is exhibited through works, and the apologists often represent Christianity itself as a law or
nomos (cf. James 1.25, Rom. 8.2—4).
5 Supplementing the lacuna with Heikel.
6 Or ‘for witness’, as that is the original meaning of the Greek word martus. The two senses
are conflated as early as Mark 13.9.
7 Cf. 2 Tim. 4.8, Rev. 4.4 etc.
8 Martyrs were highly regarded in the west, as is evident from the 25th and 60th canons of
the council of Elvira, c. 305 AD, which restrict the application of the title and the honours which
attend it. Constantine’s respect for them is attested by his own words at Eusebius, Constantine
2.40.1, but his insistence that the martyrdom should be honourable suggests that he was already
awai'e of the dubious claims advanced on behalf of some who had wilfully mn upon their deaths
or died for a sectarian form of Christianity. Opponents of the Donatists alleged that their
defection had originally been prompted by the attempt of a catholic deacon, later the Bishop of
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THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
29
too, I think, that this too has been given by God^ to help it stand and eagerly
fulfil the divine decrees.^ And to this way of life there succeeds enduring
memory and eternal glory - and very reasonably, if indeed the life of the
martyr shows discretion and mindfulness of the proclamations, and the
death is found to be full of magnanimity and nobility.^ Hymns follow this
indeed, and psalms and blessings and praise to the overseer of all. And this is
the sort of sacrifice of thanks that is performed by those who are pure from
blood and pure from all violence; nor is the odour of incense desired nor
burnt offerings,"* but a pure light such as suffices for the illumination of those
who pray,^ and among many things the greatest discretion is shown in the
feasts made for alms® and the recovery of the needy and the assistance of the
fallen.’ If anyone should deem these vulgar, he does not think according to
the divine and blessed teaching.
Carthage, to correct the misplaced devotions of a wealthy noblewoman named Lucilla (Optatus,
Against the Donatists 1.16).
1 Cf. Eph. 2.8.
2 These would include above all the commandment to love one another at the cost of life at
John 15.12-13. As it was already the custom, at least in the eastern territories, to receive the
pronouncements of emperors as ‘divine scripts’ {theia grammata), the audience at this point
could be expected to draw the inference that only those who keep the laws of God have the right
to administer those of men. See Edwards (1997), 171 n. 11; Mark the Deacon, Life of Porphyry
of Gaza 50.
3 A layman’s celebration of a practice which the leaders of the Church had long been
striving to restrain. In the second century Montanists were accused of having propagated the
worship of a false maityr; the survivors of the great massacre in Lyons in 177 found it necessary
to state that they did not venerate the bodies of their brethren; eighty years later Cyprian of
Carthage countermanded a widespread custom when he denied that it was possible for the dead
to give absolution to the living (Letter 22). Yet Constantine was not afraid to dedicate his new
capital to Lucian of Antioch even after the heretic Arius had used that martyr’s name as a
rallying-ci'y (Theodoret, Church History 1.5), and at Life of Antony 90, Athanasius reports that
the shrines continued to be defiled by pagan rituals in the mid-fourth century.
4 Cf. Hos. 6.6 and Matt. 9.13.
5 Whereas pagans kindle lamps even in the daytime, according to Tertullian, Apology 35.4.
JosQphus, Against Apion 217—19 set the example of summoning martyrs to corroborate the truth
of one’s religion.
6 ‘Pity’ (eleos) often means the giving of alms in Jewish and Christian literature; here there
may be a reference to the ‘feasts of charity’ first mentioned at Jude 12. To judge by Athanasius,
Life of Antony (cited above), these feasts were held at the martyr’s tomb. In any case, these sober
feasts are contrasted with the riotous celebrations of the pagans in Chapter 11.
7 The relief of the poor is enjoined throughout the New Testament, as in the Old (Rom.
15.26-27, 1 Cor. 8, Gal. 2.10). For the view that it is peculiar to Jews and Christians, see Veyne
(1992), 30-33, who argues that the ostentatious benefits conferred by pagan donors were not
generally extended to the neediest groups, non-citizens and slaves.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
13 . There are some indeed who also show their immaturity by finding fault
with God.* ‘What was his purpose in fashioning not one and the same nature
for existent things, but enjoining the production of different things that are
for the most part contrary to nature? This is the source of the differences in
our characters and wishes. Perhaps it was better after all, for exact obedience
to God’s commands and for the exact apprehension of him and the
confirmation of each person’s faith, for everyone to be of the same habits.
And of course this was possible, as it was God’s affair.’ Those who say this
appear to find fault with the ordering of the whole, and not to expect the
alternation of night, but to want the light of day to persist for ever, not¬
withstanding the necessity of rest; to be aggrieved by the bounds of Ocean
and land, to find fault with the earth which furnishes so many things for the
use of its inhabitants, and indeed to blame the sea, which provides a varied
path for those who sail.^ They demand that everything once for all should be
of a single form, not thinking it right that woods and mountains should
appear at all, and generally to abolish all the different products of nature
along with their appellations. And are sentiments trite? Well, is it not utterly
ridiculous to demand that all humans should be of the same habits, and not to
reflect that the ordering of the world itself is not the same as that of the
things within it, nor are physical and moral beings of the same nature, nor
are the body’s passions the same as those of soul? Eor God fashioned the
whole world from different elements.^
For since the powers of bodies are different, there are necessarily many
and different things supplied for the use of the world, seeing that the works
of nature are many and innumerable, <many produced by earth>‘* and many
by the sea and air. But the human he made a rational creature and endowed
him with the knowledge of goods and evils,^ so that he might flee evils and
pursue goods. And having endowed him with a readiness for such wisdom,
he left him with free will and permitted him to judge what character should
1 Possibly the Manichees, who urged that a world containing so many evils could not have
been designed by an almighty and benevolent God. They were persecuted by Constantine’s
predecessor Diocletian: Collation of Mosaic and Roman Statutes 15.3.
2 This celebration of natural variety has a parallel in Constantine’s tract against the
persecutors at Eusebius, Constantine 2.58.
3 A point stressed also by Lactantius, On the Wrath of God 10.
4 Inserting a phrase, after Heikel.
5 Cf. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.39.1 for the argument that knowledge of good and evil (in
both the moral and natural senses of those words) is intrinsic to the human, not merely the fallen
condition.
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be stamped on his own life, and this he did equally for all human beings.*
Whence then comes the difference of habits? It comes, in my opinion, when
we ignore the good with which providence has endowed us, and giving way
to passion or appetite, we choose the worse instead of the better. For passion
is highly belligerent, and appetite is violent, and they overthrow unthinking
people whenever they get the better of reason. When reason prevails, how¬
ever, the whole life is moderate and worthy of praise. It is applauded therefore
when, like some good charioteer,^ it pulls on the reins of its disorderly and
demented team. Hence arise faith, piety toward God, righteousness, discre¬
tion and the happy enjoyment of every kind of virtue.
These and such as these are the amendments which lead souls^ to the
Holy Judge,'* not to be condemned or incur exposure of their sins, but to
receive the honours that he himself has promised to those whose lives have
been the best.^ But those who have sinned and taken their fill of bodily
pleasures® retribution forcibly drives on, lamenting, to the appropriate punish¬
ment, in fulfilment of the righteous declaration of God. There an unquench¬
able and unceasing fire^ awaits them, there awaits them too a precipitous and
1 Following the tradition of Irenaeus {Against Heresies 4.37) and Origen in assigning free
will to all humans, even after Adam. In fact, only the Manichees and Gnostics were accused at
the time of denying this liberty.
2 A clear allusion to Plato, Phaedrus 246a, where reason is the charioteer of the soul.
3 Notwithstanding the testimony of Paul (1 Cor. 15) and the admonitions of many previous
writers (see for example [Athenagoras], On the Resurrection of the Dead), Constantine speaks
as though the soul, and not the whole of the person, were the subject of reward and retribution.
This Platonic doctrine had already begun to supersede the biblical one in Lactantius, D1 2.13,
which defines death as the ‘damnation of souls to eternal punishment’. At DI 3.12-13
Lactantius asserts the inherent immortality of the soul and seems to forget the resuiTection of
the body until 7.23. On the other hand, Constantine may have in mind such texts as Wis. 3.1
(‘the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God’), where the word ‘soul’ may, as in biblical
usage, denote the whole person; certainly the ‘righteous souls’ of Chapter 16 below are still
embodied.
4 Cf. 2 Tim. 4.8.
5 Cf. 2 Tim. 4.8 on the judgment which the martyr awaits from God.
6 Early Christianity differs from Platonism, not in being less suspicious of pleasure, but in
regarding vicious pleasure as a symptom of the fall that supervened upon the creation of the
body. See Phil. 3.19 on those ‘whose god is their belly’, the precepts of sobriety in Titus 2 etc.,
and Rom. 7.8 on concupiscence as the origin of sin.
7 See Mark 9.43 and Justin, Trypho 120.5 for the unquenchable fire {asbeston pur). As can
be seen from the first occurrence of the phrase at Homer, Iliad 16.123, such conflagrations
sometimes run their natural course, although they cannot be curbed by any natural agency.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
remote abyss.' Those who take offence at existent things are guilty of an
impious reflection, desiring one and the same value in everything. It
therefore seems unjust to the impious that the honourable should rank above
the inferior, and that the immortal nature should surpass corruptible things
and earthly creatures in blessedness, in the same degree as it is more solemn
and divine. And the human race is not without a share in the divine
goodness,^ but this is neither simply universal nor fortuitous, but is only for
those who have followed in the footsteps^ of the divine nature and chosen
the supreme pursuit of life, the knowledge of God.
14 . To compare things that come to be with those that are eternal is in
truth the most perfect madness. Eor the former have neither beginning nor
end; the latter, inasmuch as they have grown and come into being and
receive a temporal origin of their existence and life, are also subject to
death as a necessary consequence."' Now how can things that come to be
made equal to the one who ordered them to be given birth? Eor if the
former are like the latter, the decree of birth could not properly be reckoned
his. But even the things in heaven cannot be compared to the intellectual or
images to paradigms.^ How is this confusion of all things anything but
ridiculous, when the dignity of the divine is concealed by comparison with
humans and beasts? How can humans not be mad when they desire a
lordship equivalent to God’s, though they have rejected the life of
discretion and virtue? For if we lay claim at all to the divine felicity, we
ought to live our lives according to God’s command. It is in this way that
we shall pass our lives in immortal and unchanging abodes,® superior to all
1 The term abyss can be found at Deut. 32.22, cited by Justin, lApology 32, and at Prov.
8.24. The precipice appears to come from Plato, Phaedo 112d-e, unless Constantine has in
mind the deep valley of 1 Enoch 23, which finds partial confirmation in Zech. 14.4 and in
Christ’s sayings about Gehenna (e.g. Mark 9.47).
2 Cf. Gen. 2.7 on the gift of the Holy Spirit to Adam, and Rom. 2.14 on the conscience of the
Gentiles. The doctrine that all human beings possess the image, if not the full likeness, of God
was bequeathed to the Church by Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.6.1, and Origen, First Principles
3.6.1.
3 For the image cf. Porphyry, Sententiae 54.17 etc. Constantine may also have in mind the
myth that Justice, when depaiting from the world, left her footprints among the good: Virgil,
Georgies, 2.473-74.
4 Again Plato, Timaeus 27d-28b overshadows 2 Cor. 4.18.
5 Cf. Exod. 25.40, where the archetype of the Temple is revealed to Moses on Sinai; 2 Cor.
4.18, where things seen are declared to be inferior to the invisible.
6 The plural is employed, no doubt, because John 14.2 avers that there are ‘many mansions’
in the house of God.
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fate,* having lived according to the law ordained hy God. For the only power
in human beings equivalent to God’s is the absolutely unfeigned veneration
of God and the turning to him, the contemplation and learning of what pleases
the higher power, and the fact of not having inclined towards the earth but, so
far as lay in our power, of lifting our intellects toward what is upright and
sublime.^ For the victory that comes from this exercise, it is said, is superior
to many goods. The difference between existent things, both in their value
and in the comparison of their potencies, is explained on this principle, which
those who think soundly and give condign thanks obey, while the fools who
give no thanks receive the retribution that is worthy of their insolence.
15 . And indeed the Son of God summons all to virtue, having made himself
the expositor of his Father’s decrees to people of intelligence.^ That is indeed
if we do not deceive ourselves by being culpably unaware that he went about
on earth for our advantage, that is to confer beatitude on humankind, and
having called to himself the best of that time, schooled them with a life-
enhancing education, having taught them the remedy of a moderate life with
faith and righteousness in a manner opposed to the jealousy of the contrary
nature,^ whose custom is to lure and deceive the inexpert. No indeed, he
visited the sick, lightened the ills that beset the infirm,^ comforted those who
had reached extremes of poverty and distress, praised intelligent moderation
that accompanies reason, bade it endure nobly and impeccably every kind of
insult and every kind of disdain,® teaching that a thing of this kind was a sort
1 Cf. Plotinus, Enneads 4.40 and Zosimus, Treatise on the Omega 1 for the claim of the
philosopher to be superior to fate. Christians such as Ignatius, Ephesians 19.3, asserted that
Christ had broken the power of magic, which was often held to depend on cosmic sympathy
(Plotinus, Enneads 4.40).
2 On the upright posture of human beings, which prepares for the knowledge of divine
truths, cf. Lactantius, D/2.1, citing Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.85-88.
3 This is perhaps what John intends by calling Christ the logos (John 10.24-26) and is
certainly what Justin understands by the appellation at Trypho 109.2, citing Mic. 4.2 on the law
and Logos coming forth from Zion. Cf. Origen, Against Celsus 4.15 on the continuing role of
Christ as teacher.
4 On the jealousy of Satan cf. Wis. 2.28; Lactantius, D/2.13; Prudentius, Origin of Sin 188.
God is described by Plato, Timaeus 30e, as incapable of jealousy, though God gives a different
account of himself at Exod. 20.5.
5 Cf. Matt. 8.17, applying Isa. 53.5 to the healing of the sick.
6 Constantine appears to have in mind the beatitudes (see Luke 6.20 on the blessedness of
the poor; Matt. 5.5 on the meek and 5.10-12 on the persecuted). Matt. 5.44 bids the disciples
pray for those who persecute them, while Matt. 10.16 enjoins a combination of dovelike
meekness with serpentine intelligence.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
of visitation from his Eather, so that those who were magnanimous in
enduring what befell them might be perpetually victorious.*
For as the transcendent and pre-eminent form of strength, he inculcated
firmness of intellect with philosophy,^ which is the knowledge of what is
true and good, habituating those who are rich with righteousness to share
what they have with poorer people by a philanthropic distribution.^ He
prevented lordship in every way,"* showing that, just as he came to people of
moderation, so in granting favour he would pass over those who neglected
people of moderation, and that for humankind the prelude to life is need and
nakedness, and likewise death brings an end in need and nakedness.^ Only
virtue, he said, is worthy of every care.® This then he proclaimed that we
should honour, as the salvation of the soul which is seated in the rudder of
perfect virtue,^ and that we should practise the highest degree of piety,
discretion and gentleness. For this was the method ordained against all the
billows of our life.^ And having instructed the souls of his disciples with
these exhortations and many others like them, so that they might pursue the
most salutary way of life not only with spoken proclamations but with their
deeds, he went as their guide to lead them, as it were, through the long and
uninhabited tract of a burnt and dehydrated desert.® He led them too through
billows of a madding sea, enraged by winds, and sustained the waves as they
bore like solid ground the footsteps of God and of the righteous as they
1 Cf. Rom. 5.3, James 1.3.
2 Cf. Pericles’ boast that Athenians are ‘lovers of wisdom without unmanliness’ at
Thucydides 2.40.
3 Cf. Luke 19.8-9, Acts 4.34, 2 Cor. 8.14. Clement of Alexandria, On the Rich Man's
Salvation, explains how it is possible to retain one’s wealth without incurring the
condemnations pronounced at Mark 10, Luke 6.24 and James 5.1.
4 Cf. Matt. 23.8, Mark 10.42, James 4.1.
5 Cf. Job 1.21, Wis. 8.1, 1 Tim. 6.7.
6 Though the term ‘virtue’ is not unknown to apostolic authors (2 Pet. 1.5 etc.), the New
Testament prefers to speak of righteousness in the sight of God. This formulation savours more
of Plato and the Stoics.
7 For the metaphor cf. Methodius, On Resurrection 1.37; Numenius Fr. 18.3 Des Places.
8 As Constantine is now in parabolic mode, he may be alluding here to one of the episodes
in which Jesus stills a storm, e.g. Matt. 14.24-33, Mark 4.35^1. Cf. Ps. 117.29.
9 The Stoic model would be Cato in Lucan, Civil War book 9. The more obvious prototype
is of course the exodus from Egypt; on Christ as the leader of the Israelites in the wilderness see
1 Cor. 10.1-11. This and other features of Constantine’s portrait of Christ appear to be parodied
in Julian, Oration 7, 219c-d - perhaps an argument against Hanson (1973), who dates the
Oration to the reign of Julian.
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35
walked.' And having by such a great test proved the faith of the peoples who
paid heed to him, he equipped them not only to disdain dreadful and fearful
things, but also to be the most genuine disciples of the hope in him.^ And
when one of his companions was yielding too much to his passions he
restrained him with words and set him right. This one was trying to ward off
with a sword a swordsman who was advancing towards him, as though the
Saviour’s sovereign might were not present with him. Jesus bade him remain
at rest and let go of the sword, reproaching him as one who had despaired of
taking refuge in him, and openly laying down the rule that everyone who
initiates unjust acts or undertakes to use the sword against the instigator of
unrighteousness will perish by violence.^
This indeed is heavenly wisdom, to choose to be injured rather than to
injure, and when it is necessary, to suffer evil rather than to do it. For since
being unrighteous is the greatest evil, it is not the injured but the one who
injures who is overtaken by the greatest retribution.'' But it was open to one
who pays heed to God neither to injure nor to be injured, taking courage in
the protection of God, who is ever at hand and assisting, that none of those
who pay heed to him will be harmed. How could he [otherwise] have given
himself the best advice? Or could he have imagined, as it were declining the
help of God, that he had to help himself? That would be a battle between two
parties, and the victory would be dubious; but no-one of intelligence prefers
what is dubious to what is fixed. And how could one who has been tried by
such dangers, and has always been easily rescued from the terrors by God’s
mere nod,^ be likely to doubt the presence and help of God, seeing that he
has travelled through the sea which has been flattened by the Saviour’s
proclamation, and was furnishing a solid road for the peoples who traversed
it?®
1 Cf. Ps. 116.9 on the crossing of the Red Sea. For walking on waves see Matt. 14.25-29,
though here it is Christ who walks while Peter sinks.
2 The source of hope is the work of Christ, its destination glory: see Rom. 8.24, 1 Cor.
13.13, Eph. 1.18 etc.
3 See Matt. 26.51-52. The passage could be understood by the audience as a warning
against insurrection or as a commendation of Christian forbearance under the recent
persecutions.
4 A Platonic gloss on a biblical sentiment: see Plato, Gorgias 469b; Matt. 5.44; Rom. 12.21.
5 For this metaphor cf. Iliad 1.528, Constantine’s letter to Aelafius at Optatus, Against the
Donatists, Appendix 3, and Edwards (1997), 184n.
6 Cf. Exod. 15.19, Ps. 136.14. The allegory is transferred to Constantine by Eusebius,
Tricennial 9. The exodus from Egypt was of cardinal significance in Christian typology, as the
victory by which God proved himself the God of his people (Exod. 20.1) and the supreme act of
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
For this in my opinion is the evident support of faith and foundation of
obedience, when we examine those marvellous and incredible things that
have happened and been accomplished at the bidding of his providence.*
Hence it comes about that we do not repent of faith even when one falls into
the trial of evils, and keep undisturbed our hope in God.^ For when this state
comes about in the soul, God takes his seat in the intellect.^ This person is
invincible, and thus the soul that possesses this invincibility in its own
intellect will not be overcome by the evils that surround it. And this we have
learned by experience from the victory of God, who, exercising his
providence over all things, suffered the besotted iniquity of the impious, yet
reaped no harm from his affliction, but donned the greatest victory tokens
and an eternal crown in defiance of wickedness,'* bringing to fulfilment the
choice made by his providence and affection for the righteous,^ while he
subdued the ferocity of the unjust and impious.
16 . But his affliction was announced beforehand by the prophets; and
announced beforehand also was his birth in a body.® Told beforehand too
was the occasion of his embodiment, and the cause of his taking flesh was
evident also, viz. that the brood which sprang from unrighteousness and
incontinence, raging against righteous works and ways,^ might be extir¬
pated, and that the whole inhabited world might partake of intelligence and
deliverance commemorated in the Jewish Passover (Exod. 12), which was the forerunner of
Easter (1 Cor. 5.7 etc). Yet most patristic commentary on the miracle at the Red Sea dwells on
the typological meaning of the waters and neglects the pedestrian crossing. Exceptions are
Arator, a Latin poet of the sixth century {Apostolic History 2.49-52) and Gelasius, the fifth-
century compiler, whose Church History 1.5.4 contains the argument that Jews who believe in
such events have no right to doubt the vision of Constantine. If (as is almost always the case)
Gelasius had a source, it is therefore likely to have been Constantine himself, or one of the
eulogists who were in the habit of likening him to Moses: Rapp (1998).
1 Cf. John 20.30-31, Acts 2.22 and Arnobius, Nations 1.48 for the argument from miracles,
though Constantine, like most of the apologists, prefers to elaborate the proof from prophecy.
2 Cf. Rom. 5.3-5; James 1.2—4.
3 Rom. 7.23-8.5 has been conflated here with a pagan image, used e.g. by a previous
emperor, Marcus Aurelius at Meditations 3.16.
4 Cf. Col. 2.15 and Heb. 2.9.
5 Cf. Rom. 8.28—31 and Eph. 1.5, though Constantine does not hint that the righteous were
predestined, except in so far as God was sure to reward their works.
6 Cf. Matt. 1.23, citing Isa. 7.14, which in the Septuagint clearly prophesies birth from a
virgin. Kamesar (1990) shows that the application of this text to the virgin birth was supported
in antiquity by strong philological arguments, even by such proponents of the Hebrew text as
Jerome.
7 Cf. Matt. 3.7, where the teachers of the Jews are called a ‘generation of vipers’.
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THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
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discretion, as the law dispensed by the Saviour prevailed in the souls of
almost everyone,^ reverence for God grew strong and superstition^ was
wiped out. This had given rise to the notion, not only of sacrificing irrational
creatures,^ but also of devoting human victims'* and the unholy pollution of
altars.^ According to Egyptian® and Assyrian laws, people sacrificed righteous
souls to idols of bronze and clay.^ However, Memphis and Babylon^ have
received the fruit that was proper to such worship, having been laid waste
and left uninhabited along with their ancestral gods. And this I say not from
report, but I myself have been present to behold it, and have been an eye¬
witness of the miserable fortune of the cities.® Memphis is waste,'® where
Moses in accordance with the decree of God shattered the arrogance of
1 Whatever we believe about the spread of Christianity before Constantine, this is clearly an
instance of the hyperbole which Lane Fox (1986), 269 discovers in many Christian apologists.
2 For this term see Chapter 1.
3 For the claim that sacrifice is a consequence of the fall, see Teitullian, On Fasting 4,
where Noah’s offering at Gen. 8.20 supplies the prototype. Eusebius, Tricennial 253.6 Heikel
boasts of the bloodless sacrifices of Christians, alluding to Rom. 12.2. Pagan admirers of
Porphyry’s On Abstinence might be expected to look on such a cult with interest and
goodwill.
4 The testimony of Eusebius, Gospel Preparation 4.15.6 and 4.17.4 that human sacrifices
were offered in Africa up to the time of Hadrian, appears to be borne out by Tertullian, Apology
9.2, if this indeed states that the atrocities persisted up to the time of his father’s military
service. Plutarch, On Superstition, considers human sacrifice to be the most heinous case of
false religion; he like other Greeks, imputes it only to barbarians. For this reason it was also a
widespread calumny against Christians; Rives (1995) observes that, by throwing the obloquy
back on the persecutors, Christians proved themselves the tme custodians of an endangered
humanism.
5 Cf. Dan. 8.13, Matt. 24.15 and parallels on the ‘abomination of desolation’.
6 Herodotus, Histories 2.45 denied that the Egyptians ever practised human sacrifice, but
Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 73 cites Manetho, a native priest, to the contrary. As Rives (1995), 68
observes, it was generally Busiris, a mythical tyrant slain by Heracles, who was accused of this
atrocity. Constantine, however, is retorting upon the whole people the charges that Egyptians
such as Apion had levelled against the Jews: see further Josephus, Against Apion 2.93-95 and
Rives (1995), 71.
7 Eusebius, Gospel Preparation 4.17.3 relates that all the Syrians practised human sacrifice,
and Tertullian, Apo/ogy 19.2 names Belus of Assyria (i.e. Baal) as the coeval of Saturn, King of
the Titans, who was the most famous devourer of infants both in Greek myth and in Carthage.
8 Here apparently taken as the capital of Assyria; see below on Nebuchadnezzar.
9 Barnes (1976b), 184 cites Eusebius, Constantine 1.19 to show that Constantine may have
accompanied Diocletian to these places in his march to Ctesiphon.
10 Strabo, Geography 17.32 agrees that Memphis in Egypt is largely desolate, though he
attests its fame as a sanctuary of Apis; cf. Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel 9.30.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
Pharaoh,* the greatest potentate of the time, and destroyed his army, victor
as it was over many of the greatest nations and fenced round with arms - not
by shooting arrows or launching javelins, but just by holy prayer and meek
adoration.^
17 . And no people would ever or could ever have been more blessed than
that one, had they not voluntarily cut off their souls from the Holy Spirit.^
What could one say about Moses to match his worth? Leading a disorderly
people into good order, having set their souls in order by persuasion and
awe,'* he procured freedom for them in place of captivity, and he made their
faces bright instead of blear,^ and caused their souls to advance so far that,
through their excessive change to the contrary and the good fortune of their
achievement, they became superhumanly boastful.® Moses excelled his
predecessors in wisdom to such a degree that even those who were praised
by the nations as wise men and philosophers came to emulate his wisdom.’
Eor Pythagoras, by imitating his wisdom, obtained so great a reputation for
temperance as to make his self-denial a model for the most temperate Plato.*
And as for Daniel, who prophesied what was to come, performed the
greatest works of magnanimity and excelled in the beauty of his character
and his whole life, what grave and harsh offence he suffered from the then
tyrant of Assyria whom he defeated!® His name was Nebuchadnezzar, and
1 Though not mentioned in Exodus 14, Memphis is almost a synonym for Egypt at Hos. 9.6.
It may already have been customary for Constantine’s panegyrics to compare the immersion of
Pharaoh in the Red Sea with the drowning of Maxentius and his army in the Tiber at the Milvian
Bridge in 312: see Eusebius, Constantine 1.38; Rapp (1998), 686-88.
2 As in Chapter 11, an allusion to the passage of the Red Sea. Only a Christian audience
would be expected to tolerate such an appeal to miracles; Josephus, Against Apion 2.154-63
accords an equally prominent place to Moses, but dwells on his wisdom and courage, omitting
all the maiwellous elements in the biblical narrative.
3 Combining Ps. 95.11 (cited at Heb. 3.18) with Ps. 51.11; the Selections on the Psalms
ascribed to Origen assert that the latter text must have an allegorical meaning.
4 Cf. Philo, On Virtues 80 (Moses as lawgiver), and The Heir of Divine Things 81 (his
disciples).
5 Cf. p. 27 and Gen. 40.7 on the restoration of Joseph to his guilty yet grieving brethren.
6 On the boastfulness of the Jews cf. Luke 18.11, Rom. 3.17, 2 Cor. 11.17 etc.
7 For Pythagoras’ debt to the Jews see e.g. Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras 11; lamblichus, On
the Pythagorean Life 14.
8 Cf. Numenius, Fr. 1 Des Places on Pythagoras as the mentor of Plato.
9 Though Nebuchadnezzar was king of Babylon, he is styled king of Assyria at Jdt. 1.1. For
Constantine the confusion is felicitous, as Virgil (see below) alludes to the Assyrian herb.
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when his whole line was wiped out/ the awful and immense power of his
passed to the Persians. For the wealth of the tyrant was celebrated/ and is so
even now, as is his untimely concern for the wrong mode of worship, the
abundant supply of metals for the construction of gods and ships of a
heaven-scaling altitude,^ and the terrible laws of worship that he laid down
with savage intent.^ But Daniel, spurning all these through his unsullied
worship of the true God, foretold that the untimely zeal of the tyrant was
going to be the cause of some great evil.^ Yet he failed to persuade the tyrant,
since unstinted riches stand in the way of sound intelligence.® At the end
indeed the potentate revealed the wildness of his intellect when he ordered
wild beasts to ravage the just one.’
Noble too was the unanimity of the brothers bearing witness.* Those
who subsequently emulated them won immense glory for their faith in the
Saviour. Not ravaged by fire and furnace and the terrible ones appointed to
devour them, they drove back the encompassing fire in the furnace by the
holy contact of their bodies. And Daniel, after the dissolution of the Assyrian
state, when it was destroyed by the launching of thunderbolts,® went over to
Cambyses, the king of the Persians,^® by the providence of God. But there
too was envy and with envy the pernicious attacks of the magi," great and
1 See Daniel 31 on the fall of Nebuchadnezzar’s son Belshazzar.
2 Not only in the Bible: see Lucretius, On the Nature of Things 4.
3 Cf. Ezek. 27.3-9. The conflation of scriptural prophecies is justified insofar as the prophets
themselves often make use of generic images, rather than describing concrete phenomena.
4 See the command to worship the statue at Dan. 3.4-6.
5 Daniel interprets the evil omen of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream at Dan. 4.22-27.
6 As Daniel hints to Belshazzai* at Dan. 5.17: ‘thy gifts be to thyself, O King’.
7 See Dan. 14.32—33 on the madness of Nebuchadnezzar who began to act like a beast. In
the portion of the Greek version known as Bel and the Dragon, the unnamed king of Babylon
has Daniel thrown to lions.
8 Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were cast into the fiery furnace for refusing to worship
Nebuchadnezzar’s idol: Dan. 3.16-20. See also the ‘Song of the Three Children', which forms
part of the Greek text.
9 Assimilating the overthrow of this kingdom to that of Sodom and Gomoixah at Gen. 19.25.
10 The new king was Darius the Mede, according to Dan. 5.31. Even the translators of the
Septuagint, who substituted the name Artaxerxes, knew that this Darius was fictitious. The
name Cambyses has crept into the narrative here, either because this was the name of the father
of Cyms of Persia, the true conqueror of Babylon, or because a second Cambyses, the heir of
Cyrus, was reckoned to be ‘a second Nebuchadnezzar, spoken of in the book of Judith’ (see
Eusebius, Chronicle 104).
11 The traditional name for the Zoroastrian priesthood and hence for eastern magicians and
astrologers. Although they paid homage to Christ at Matt. 2.1-10, the name was applied
indiscriminately to the instigators of persecution, e.g. at Eusebius, Church History 7.10.4.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
numerous dangers in succession, from all of which he was easily saved with
the help of Christ’s providence,* and easily excelled in the trial of every kind
of virtue. For when the man prayed three times a day,^ as he practised the
great and eminent virtues that gave rise to his memorable works, the magi
enviously slandered the very efficacy of his prayers, and slanderously telling
the potentate that his great power was very dangerous, they persuaded him to
sentence Daniel to be a sacrifice to savage lions, though he had been an
instrument of such great public goods to the Persians. But Daniel’s sentence
and imprisonment led not to his doom but to his eternal renown. And set in
the midst of beasts, he found the beasts milder than his jailers. For his prayer,
assisting the virtue of rectitude and discretion, rendered docile those who
were mad by nature. And when this was made known to Cambyses (for the
achievements of such great and divine power could not be left in darkness^),
he himself was staggered by the marvellous nature of what was reported,
and regretted the easy credence that he had given to the slanders of the
magi.'* None the less, he dared to become an observer of this spectacle, and
to see the man who was hymning Christ by the raising of both hands, the
lions meanwhile submissive and as it were adoring the footprints of the
man.^ And forthwith he sentenced the magi who had persuaded him to the
same penalty, and imprisoned the magi in the den of the lions. The beasts
who a little before had been obsequious rushed on the magi and ravaged
them in accordance with their own nature.®
18 . But it rests with me also to commemorate foreign witnesses to the
divinity of Christ. For these make it obvious that even those who
blasphemed him knew in their minds that he was God and the child of God,
1 An inference from Dan. 3.25, where the three children are accompanied by an angel,
whom Nebuchadnezzar calls a son of god. Moreover, Hippolytus, Commentary on Daniel 3.29
makes the prophet a type of Christ, chiefly because at 6.17 he is confined in a pit with a stone
across its mouth.
2 Dan. 6.3-9. According to Eusebius, Constantine 3.49, Constantine set up an image of
Daniel and the lions in Constantinople. Hippolytus, Commentary on Daniel 3.24 compares the
outstretched hands of Daniel to those of Moses during the battle with the Amalekites (Exod.
17.11); this in turn could be read as a prefigurement of the Cross (Justin, Trypho 49.80).
3 Cf. Matt. 5.14-16.
4 Dan. 6.19-23, expanded in the Septuagintal version.
5 For this picturesque supplement to the biblical narrative cf. Hippolytus, Commentary on
Daniel 3.27.
6 Dan. 6.24. Constantine omits the information that the wives and children of the male¬
factors perished with them.
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if indeed they believe their own words. Now the Erythraean Sibyl,' saying
that she was born in the sixth generation after the flood, was a priestess of
Apollo, wearing a diadem on equal terms with the god whom she wor¬
shipped, in charge of the tripod round which the snake was coiled.^ She
made predictions for those who consulted her, her parents having foolishly
presented her for this kind of service, from which come indecent passions^
and nothing worthy of reverence, just as is reported of Daphne.'' And once,
having been led into the sanctuaries of untimely superstition and become
full of truly divine^ inspiration, she foretold in words what was to happen
with respect to God, plainly revealing by the prefixing of the initial letters,
which is called an acrostic,® the history of Jesus’ descent:
1 On the Erythraean Sibyl see Lactantius, D1 1.6.10, though DI 7.19.9, which quotes a
portion of this acrostic, implies that it was the work of a different sibyl. Sibylline eschatology is
cited most frequently by Latin authors: cf. Athenagoras, Embassy 30, where the Sibyl is merely
an authority on the nature of God.
2 Although the Delphic Sibyl was called the Pythia, and legend traced the name to Apollo’s
slaying of the serpent Python, the presence of a snake at Apollo’s oracles is otherwise
unattested. They did, however, serve as putative instruments of prophecy elsewhere: see e.g.
Lucian’s Alexander on the oracle of Glycon.
3 Cf. Prudentius, Against Symmachus 2.1064-113 on the unwholesome passions of the
Vestal Virgins. Both he and Constantine imply a contrast between the impurity of pagan virgins
and the chastity of their Christian rivals; prophecy is once again the privilege of virgins at Acts
21.9 (and one might add in Mary’s Magnificat at Luke 1.46-55).
4 Readers of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1.452-563) would remember Apollo’s attempted rape
of Daphne as the first crime of the gods against humanity. Daphne was saved by being turned
into a laurel, the leaves of which were said to produce a divine intoxication when they were
chewed by the Delphic Sibyl. Had the speech been delivered at Antioch, a reference might be
intended to the shrine of Apollo at neighbouring Daphne. Hanson (1973), citing Ammianus
Marcellinus 22.12.8 and Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 5.22, claims to detect an allusion to an
episode in the reign of the Emperor Julian {Passion of Artemius, at Lieu and Montserrat (1996),
244—47). In that case the Oration would be a forgery; on the other hand, Constantine, who had
once regarded Apollo as his patron, seems to have entertained a peculiar hostility to him after
his conversion, which would suffice to explain this jibe. See Eusebius, Constantine 2.50 and
3.54. Lactantius, Pers. 11.7 corroborates this testimony to Apollo’s hatred of the Christians; cf.
the jibe at DI 4.13. Moraux (1954), II, 271 shows that Diocletian’s devotion to Apollo is
confirmed by epigraphy.
5 To judge by Acts 16.16-18, where Paul expels the spirit of false prophecy from a woman
whom the author calls a python, Christians saw mantic inspiration as a form of demonic
possession.
6 The acrostic spells the words lesous Christos Theou Huios Soter Stauros (Jesus Christ,
Son of God, Saviour, Cross). The first five words ai‘e a standard formula, often represented by
a drawing of a fish because their initial letters make up the Greek word Ichthus. The full acrostic
appears as 11. 217-50 in the extant text of the eighth Sibylline Oracle, but in Augustine’s Latin
version at City of God 18.23 the Stauros-lines are wanting. Lactantius, DI 7.16 and 7.19 cites
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
In sign of coming judgment earth shall sweat;
Eternal monarchy' shall come from heaven
Straightway to judge the flesh and all the world.^
Outcasts and the elect shall look on God,^
Uplifted at time’s end with all the saints,''
Set on his throne to judge all flesh ensouled.^
Chaff now and earth shall all the world become;®
Riches and all their idols men shall break;^
Earth, sky and sea shall be consumed in flames;*
Invading fire shall breach the gates of hell.^
Sinner and saint shall rise to day’s free light;'"
Their flesh the fire shall test eternally."
Of secret deeds none shall remain unknown.
Since God’s torch shall unlock the heart’s recess.*^
Then shall all people wail and gnash their teeth;*"
Eclipse shall hide the sun and dancing stars,*'*
only fragments of the same oracle in Greek with no acknowledgement of the acrostic. Since
Augustine’s version fails to reproduce the acrostic perfectly, it seems unlikely that Constantine
was familiar with a more successful rendering. Had he quoted the lines in Greek to a Latin
audience, few would have been capable of following the acrostic; but as this would be almost
equally true for an audience of Greek speakers, the most probable conjecture is that the lines
were added in a written version published after the delivery of the speech.
1 Heb. 1.8 applies Ps. 45.6 (‘Thy throne, 0 God, is for ever and ever’) to Christ. Other texts
(Matt. 13.43,1 Cor. 15.28) could be taken to assert that only the kingdom of the father is eternal.
That Christ’s kingdom shall have no end (Luke 1.33, Rev. 11.15) was already an article of the
Roman creed according to Kinzig and Vinzent (1999).
2 That Christ would return for judgment was also an article of the Roman creed. It has the
support of many texts, e.g. Matt. 16.27, John 5.22, Rom. 14.10
3 Cf. Isa. 40.5, Zech. 12.10, Mark 14.62, 1 John 3.2, Rev. 1.9.
4 See Dan. 7.27 on the everlasting kingdom of the saints; 1 Thess. 3.13 on the saints in the
train of Christ.
5 Thus the poem insists on a corporeal resurrection, as 2 Cor. 5.10 insists that ‘everyone
shall receive for things done in his body’. For the throne see Matt. 25.41, Rev. 4.2 etc.
6 Cf. Matt. 3.12, Luke 3.17 on the winnowing-fan of Christ.
7 Cf. Mic. 1.7.
8 Cf. 2Pet. 3.10-12
9 On the gates of hell cf. Matt. 16.18.
10 Cf. Dan. 12.2.
11 Cf 1 Cor. 3.15, 1 Pet. 4.12
12 Cf Matt. 10.26, Luke 12.2, 1 Cor. 4.5.
13 On the remorse of the damned cf. Matt. 14.42, 14.50.
14 Cf Joel 2.10, Luke 23.44^5, Acts 2.20 etc.
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Oblivion wrap the heavens and the moon’s light,'
Uplifting hollows, casting down high peaks.^
Huge sorrow then shall fall on humankind.^
In peak and plain there shall be no distinction;
Ocean shall bear no ships, as thunderbolts
Strip the burnt land of springs and sounding rivers."*
Sounds of lament shall trumpet^ forth from heaven.
Omen of squalor, grief and cosmic pain.
Then yawning earth shall open Tartarus;®
Emperors all shall come before God’s throne;^
Rivers of holy flame shall pour from heaven.®
Signs manifest to all men there shall be:®
True men shall crave the branches of the Cross.*"
As men grow pious Christ will shock the world,"
Unveiling the elect with his twelve springs.'^
Rod shall be shepherd, ruling as with iron.*®
Our God is this, set forth now in acrostics.
Saviour immortal, king who died for us.*"*
And by divine power these things were plainly appointed for the virgin to
prophesy. And for my part I think her blessed, since the Saviour chose her as
prophetess of his own forethought for us.
1 Cf. Isa. 34.4 and 51.6, Ezek. 32.7, Matt. 24.35, Mark 13.24-25 etc.
2 Cf. Isa. 40.4, Mic. 1.4.
3 As prophesied at Matt. 24.21 and parallels.
4 Cf. Rev. 21.2 on the disappearance of the sea.
5 Cf. Matt. 24.31, 1 Cor. 15.52, 1 Thess. 4.16, Rev. 8.16.
6 Cf. Rev. 20.13. For the name Tartarus see the Greek and Latin versions of the Inventio in
this volume, and compare the use of Acheron, another mythological appellation for the
underworld, by Constantine himself at Eusebius, Constantine 2.54.
7 Cf. Ps. 72.10-11.
8 Cf. Gen. 19.24 on the incineration of Sodom and GomoiTah. There may also be an allusion
to the waters of the underworld in pagan myth, though Constantine slights these in Chapter 9.
9 Cf. Matt. 24.30-33 and parallels.
10 Literally ‘horns of the Cross’; cf. Eusebius, Constantine 1.31. On the display of the cross
in Rome see Eusebius, Constantine 1.40.
11 On Christ and his cross as a skandalon or ‘stumbling-block’ cf. Matt. 13.21, 1 Cor. 1.23.
12 Meaning the twelve apostles, as at Matt. 19.28.
13 Cf. Rev. 12.5, 19.15.
14 The Oracle, like Constantine and unlike Arius, does not hesitate to call Christ God. His
cross bore an ironic proclamation of his kingship, as Matt. 27.37 and parallels attest.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
19 . The majority, however, do not believe, even though they agree that
there was an Erythraean Sibyl who was a seer. Instead they suspect that
someone of our own religion, not devoid of the poetic muse, composed
these verses, and that they were spuriously called verses of the Sibyl,
containing as they do life-enhancing maxims which curtail the strong
authority of pleasures and conduce to discretion and well-ordered life.* But
the truth is manifest, since the studies of our own men have calculated the
times more accurately, so that no-one can hold the wild theory that the
poem came into being after the descent and judgment of Christ and that a lie
was put about that the words had been spoken long before by the Sibyl.^ Eor
it is agreed that Cicero, having encountered the poem, translated it into the
Roman tongue and included it among his own compositions,^ and that this
man was destroyed during the ascendancy of Antony."* And then Augustus
got the better of Antony and reigned for fifty-six years.^ Tiberius succeeded
him, and it was in his time that the presence of the Saviour shone forth,® and
the mystery of the most holy religion prevailed.’ Then a new race of people
1 Cf. Lactantius, Dl 7.15.26.
2 See e.g. Lactantius, DI 1.6.7-15 on Varro.
3 That is, he cited it at On Divination 2.56, but arguing the contrary, viz. that lines penned
with such labour cannot be divinely inspired. Hall (1998), 666-67 suggests that Constantine’s
claim to have conquered instinctu divinitatis (‘by divine impulse’) is based on knowledge of On
Divination, but in my view the case for dependence ought to be qualified by an
acknowledgement of the freedom with which Constantine used this and the other fruits of his
education.
4 After the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC Rome was briefly ruled by the
triumvirate of Lepidus, Mark Antony and Octavian. Antony was Caesar’s friend, Octavian his
adopted son. Though Cicero attempted to make a protege of Octavian, and reserved his most
scurrilous rhetoric for Antony, the proscription which resulted in his death was the work of all
three triumvirs. Edwards (1999a), 214 points out that Cicero receives honourable though not
uncritical mention in Lactantius, who, like the Augustus of 27 BC, professed to think
everything after the Republic decadent. Thus Constantine would naturally wish to remove the
stigma of this crime from his predecessor, even before his panegyrists began to draw
comparisons: see Latin Panegyrics 4(10).31, echoing famous lines from the Aeneid.
5 It was only in 31 BC that Octavian finally vanquished Antony, and only in 27 BC when
proclaiming a disingenuous ‘restoration of the republic’ that he assumed the title Augustus and
initiated that epoch of Roman history which we call the Principate or the early Empire. As
Augustus died in 14 AD, Constantine is dating his reign from 41 BC, when victory at Pemsia
put his hegemony in Rome beyond dispute. The Chronicle of Eusebius takes the same view.
6 For the metaphor cf. 1 Tim. 3.16.
7 Luke 3.1 dates the inception of Jesus’ ministry to the fifteenth year of Tiberius, i.e. 29/30
AD.
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THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
45
was established, of which I think the most eminent of the Italian poets^
spoke:
Whence then appeared a novel race of men^
And again, in another passage of the Bucolics:
Sicilian Muses, let our theme be great^
What could be plainer than this? For he adds:
The oracle of Cumae is fulfilled"^
Obviously the expression ‘of Cumae’ refers enigmatically to the Sibyl. And
he was not content with this but advanced further, as though the matter
required his own testimony. What did he say?
For us^ the roll of ages starts anew.^
The Maid returns with our beloved King.
1 To a Greek assembly, this circumlocutory reference to Virgil would be a cryptogram; to a
Roman one it would be both perspicuous and endearing. The Fourth Eclogue, the most majestic
of Virgil’s early poems, purports to have been composed in 40 BC. It prophesies the birth of a
marvellous infant, who has been identified as: (a) the child of Asinius Pollio, addressed as
consul in the poem; (b) the child of Antony and Queen Cleopatra of Egypt; (c) the child of
Antony and his bride Octavia, sister of Octavian; (d) the child of Octavian and his bride
Scribonia; (e) the prophesied Messiah of Jewish scripture; (f) the child of the east whose reign
is foretold in the Third Sibylline Oracle: (g) a purely symbolic figure, for whom the poet
himself may not have had a name. The classic study of parallels between the Eclogue and
messianic literature, including the Sibylline Oracles, is Norden (1924). Nisbet (1978) remains
a useful suiwey and appraisal of rival critical approaches. The edition consulted in my
annotations is that of Coleman (1977).
2 Virgil spoke of a ‘new scion’ {nova progenies): the plural may have been put into the mind
of the translator by Sibylline Oracles 3.282, or by the ancestor of this at Hesiod, Works and
Days 90-92.
3 In Virgil,‘somewhat greater’.
4 Eclogue 4.4, where the Latin speaks of a ‘final age’. Constantine no doubt deleted this
because the end had not yet come. Cumae in Campania was the abode of the sibyl visited by the
hero in Book 6 of the Aeneid.
5 Edwards (1999b), 259 surmises that the speaker has confused Eclogue 4.5 ( mamus ab
integro saeclorum nascitur ordo, ‘the great order of ages is born from the beginning’) with
Aeneid 7.44 {maior rerum mihi nascitur ordo . ‘a new order of things is born for me’) to
precipitate a new line: magnus ab integro rerum mihi nascitur ordo. In Latin the confusion is
facilitated by metrical and verbal similarities which are unlikely to have been preserved in
Greek, even if both lines had already been translated.
6 The translator has omitted the words Saturnia regna (‘kingdom of Saturn’), perhaps
because Greek readers, who knew Saturn only as the Latin equivalent of the child-devouring
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
Who therefore would this returning maiden be?' Would it not be she who
became full and pregnant by the divine Spirit? And what was to prevent the
maid who was impregnated by the divine Spirit from being and always
remaining^ a virgin? And she will come a second time when God also for a
second time relieves the inhabited world by his advent. And the poet adds:
Worship the newborn child, light-bearing moon,
Who gives the age of gold for that of iron;^
For when he rules all human wounds are healed
And all the groans of sin are put to death.'*
Now we understand that these things have been said through allegories, at
the same time manifestly and obscurely, the divinity of Christ leading to
vision those who examine the force of the words more deeply.^ In order that
Cronos, would not be aware that this was a Latin name for the Golden Age. His substitution of
the term ‘of ages’ for ab integro ‘from the beginning’ is probably designed to acquit the emperor
of holding a doctrine of the eternal recun'ence such as Christians reprimanded in the Stoics. Cf.
Justin, lApology 7.3
1 Most scholars would answer. Justice, who is said to have been driven from the world by
the immorality of the human race: Aratus, Phenomena 133; cf. Virgil, Georgies 2.473-74 and
Sibylline Oracles 3.9. As she was represented by the constellation Virgo - see Nisbet (1978), 71
- the poet may be announcing the completion of some astronomical cycle.
2 Notwithstanding the references to Jesus’ brothers and sisters at Mark 6.3 and parallels, the
perpetual virginity of Mary was already assumed by Origen, Homilies on Leviticus 8.2, and by
the fourth century had become a dogma for orthodox writers. This new status not only enabled
Mary to displace the maiden goddesses of Greece (Athene, Hecate, Persephone and Artemis),
but invested her with the typological properties of Israel, whose chastity in the Old Testament,
though not inviolable, is perennially renewed.
3 Eclogue 4.8—10a. The Lucina of the original has been replaced by the moon in this
translation - a Christianizing touch, as the moon is bidden to worship God at Ps. 148.3. The age
of gold is the first state of the world in ancient theories deriving from Hesiod, Works and Days
111. Where other Latin apologists denounced the Saturnia regna as a fable of the poets
(Tertullian, Apology 10; Lactantius, D1 1.11), Constantine is happy throughout this speech to
equate the biblical paradise with the fanciful topographies of philosophers and poets. Apolitical
undertone may be suspected, as Virgil had attributed spontaneous fertility to the Italy of
Augustus in his Georgies, while the satellites of Maximian and Diocletian claimed to have
witnessed a doubling in the crop throughout the Empire: Latin Panegyrics 11(3).15.
4 Eclogue 4.13-14. In the original line 13, the Latin was te duce, ‘thou as leader’, alluding
to the consulship of Pollio, and line 14 suggested release from fear rather than sin. The
translator has been able to improve on the original; Constantine’s commentary simply ignores
what is alien to his puipose.
5 Cf. Origen, Philokalia 5.4 and Against Celsus 4.15 on Christ as the teacher who is
concealed within the written word of scripture. Augustine later took up this theme in his treatise
On the Master.
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THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
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none of those who held power in the royal city shall have grounds to
reproach the poet as one who writes in defiance of paternal laws and
repudiates the customary practices of his ancestors with regard to the gods,
it conceals the truth. ^ For he knew, as I believe, the blessed and laudable end
of the Saviour, but in order to avert the rage of savagery, he directed the mind
of his audience towards their own tradition, and says that it is necessary to
establish altars, build temples and perform sacrifices to the newborn one.
And for intelligent readers the rest of his composition is in keeping with this,
for he says:
20. He shall receive God’s deathless life^ and see
Heroes his massed companions -
Obviously the righteous -
He himself
To home and yearning blest ones shall appear,^
Steering the world with his paternal virtues.
For thee then, child, earth’s earliest gifts do grow.
Barley and oats, acanthus mixed with bean.'*
A marvellous man, with all the ornaments of learning, who, accurately
perceiving the savagery of the present times, says:
For thee rich goats, their udders overflowing.
Shall of themselves produce sweet springs of milk;
Nor shall fierce lions terrify the herds.^
He speaks truly; for faith will not fear the potentates in their royal halls.
Thy swaddling-clothes® shall bring forth fragrant grass;
The venomed snake shall perish, perish too
Plague; and in vales the Assyrian herb shall thrive.^
1 Constantine is more generous to Virgil than Lactantius (DI 7.22), who imputes the poet’s
obscurity to his ignorance of the truth.
2 The Latin of Eclogue 4.15 has deum vitam, a poetic contraction of deonmi vham, ‘the life
of the gods’. The Greek translator may have mistaken deum for the accusative singular.
3 Eclogue 4.17, though the translation is reminiscent of Odyssey 21.209 etc.
4 A loose rendering of Eclogue 4.19-20, with analogues at Sibylline Oracles 3.744^9.
5 Eclogue 4.21-22, with analogues at Sibylline Oracles 3.788-95.
6 The Latin is cunabula (‘cradle’). To judge by the following commentary, Constantine
seems to take this word to mean something like ‘the occasion of thy birth’. See Kurfess (1936), 99.
7 Eclogue 4.23-25, though there is no mention of plague in the Latin.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
No-one could say anything truer than this, or more germane to the virtue of
the Saviour; for his very swaddling-clothes, the power of the Holy Spirit,'
engender as it were a fragrant flower in freshness. And the snake perishes,
and the venom of that snake, who deceived the first creation,^ leading their
minds away from the <discretion>^ planted in them to the enjoyment of
pleasures,'' so that they might know the destruction appointed for them. For
before the descent of the Saviour, he used to break the souls of humans, who,
not knowing the immortality of the righteous,^ were supported by no good
hope. But when the Saviour suffered, and at the due time the body which
enclosed him was separated® the possibility of the resurrection was revealed
to humankind through the Holy Spirit;'^ and if some dirt of human
unrighteousness was left, all of this was washed away by holy ablutions.*
Then indeed he bids those who heed him to take courage, and from his own
awesome and splendid resurrection, he bade them hope that a like fate would
be theirs.®
Justly therefore the whole breed of venomous creatures has perished,
and death too has perished'" and the resurrection has been sealed." The race
of the Assyrians has perished too, which was a contributor to faith in God;
but in saying that the herb grows abundantly and everywhere, he describes
the multitude of those who worship. For it springs up like a multitude of
1 Cf. Luke 1.35, where the Holy Spirit overshadows Mary.
2 The subtle beast of Gen. 3.1. identified as Satan in Rev. 12.9.
3 Supplying a word with Heikel.
4 Before Augustine identified pride as the root of Adam’s sin, the transgression of Adam and
Eve was generally traced to carnal appetite, as by Origen, Homily on Genesis 1. Constantine is
probably imagining an incremental history of corruption, rather than a single decisive instance,
and he appears to have the Old Testament on his side.
5 Dan. 12.2 is the only passage in the Hebrew Bible which undoubtedly predicts the
resurrection of the righteous. Mark 9.10 says that the disciples were still ignorant of the ‘rising
from the dead’, though this was now a tenet of the Pharisees (Acts 23.6).
6 On the severance of body and spirit in Christ see Luke 23.46 and John 20.30. For
Constantine, however, the separated element is not spirit but body, the latter being a temporary
adjunct to the essential nature of Christ.
7 Cf. Rom. 1.3.
8 On baptism cf. Matt. 28.19, 1 Cor. 6.11, Tit. 3.5, Heb. 10.22. etc. If Constantine was
indeed baptized on his deathbed, as a credible but not uncontested report affirms, he must none
the less have regarded himself at this stage as a catechumen prepaiing for the rite.
9 Cf. Rom. 8.11.
10 Cf. Isa. 25.8, 1 Cor. 15.54, Rev. 20.14.
11 Cf. 2Cor. 1.22, Eph. 1.13.
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THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
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branches from a single root,' thriving with fragrant flowers and watered
evenly by dew.^ And learned too, O Maro^ wisest of poets, and consistent is
all that follows:
Heroic virtues thou shall learn, the feats
Of thy great sire, with fortitude adorned."*
- signifying by heroic virtues the deeds of the righteous, and meaning by the
virtues of his sire the organization of the world and the realization of eternal
stability. Equally he means the laws that the devout Church observes when it
practises the life of righteousness and discretion. Marvellous too is the
progress toward consummation of the life between goods and evils, which
declines the suddenness of an instant change:
First came the acres of the golden flowers,^
(that is, the fruit® of the divine law came at need)
And on red brambles sprang the clustered grape^
(which did not happen in the unrighteous life)
Down the pine’s hard flanks runs a stream of honey
He is sketching the stupidity of humans at that time and their hardened
characters. Equally he is teaching that those who labour in God’s toil will
receive some sweet fruit of their own endurance:
1 This simile for the kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar (Dan. 4.12) is transferred to the kingdom
of God at Mark 4.32.
2 Cf. Isa. 35.1, Ps. 72.6.
3 The rhetorical device of addressing an absent person is called ‘apostrophe'; Virgil’s full
name was Publius Virgilius Maro. The cognomen Mai'o is frequently employed in Latin,
especially when, as at Lactantius, Z)/1.13.12, the author wishes to express a sense of kinship; it
is unlikely that this usage would mean anything to a Greek audience at this date.
4 Eclogue 4.26-27.
5 Eclogue 4.28. The word paulatim (‘gradually’) is omitted in the translation but
presupposed in the comment that introduces the verse. Thus Constantine clearly has the Latin in
mind; he may be concerned to justify the slowness of his own reforms.
6 On Christ as the fruit of Mary’s womb cf. Luke 1.42; on the fmits of the kingdom see e.g.
Matt. 21.43.
7 Eclogue 4.29. The Greek has transposed the Latin words rubeus (‘red’) and incultis
(‘uncultivated’).
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Yet traces of that old infatuation'
Remain: the sea traversed, the cities walled,
The ploughman’s glehe churned up hy dragging oxen.
Tiphys shall come again, and, glad^ with heroes,
A new Thessalian Argo. Greece and Troy,
Tried hy a new Achilles, fight again.^
Well said, O wisest of poets Eor you wielded the authority of poetry to its
fitting limits. Of course it was not for you to give oracles, since you were not
a prophet,^ and you were prevented, I think, by a certain danger attaching to
those who censure ancestral customs. But you set forth the truth in a secure
and guarded manner, so far as was possible, for those with the power of
understanding, making towers and wars the agents, which even now are to
be found in human life. He warred indeed directly against the opposing evil
power,® sent forth by his own providence at the bidding of his great Eather.’
What then does the poet say after this?
But when the hour and fruit of manhood come®
1 Meaning either the murder by Romulus of his brother Remus on the day of Rome’s
foundation, or else the folly of the Trojan king Laomedon, whose refusal to pay the divine
masons of his city led eventually to its downfall and the flight of Aeneas from Troy to Italy.
Even Christians who did not believe that Adam’s sin was the cause of every other were familiar
with biblical phrases tracing the source of evil to the beginning (John 8.44, Rom. 5.17-18, 1
Cor. 15.22).
2 The translator has mistaken the word delectos (‘chosen’) for dilectos (‘beloved, desired’).
3 Eclogue 4.31-36. The Argo, built by Tiphys, was commonly reputed to have been the first
ship, and was used for the capture of the Golden Fleece. The Trojan war, in which Achilles
figured as the best warrior of the Greeks, marked the end of the age of heroes, and was often
used as a touchstone in chronology.
4 What Greek, even if forging an oration on behalf of a Latin speaker, would have given
such an accolade to Virgil?
5 Justin, 1 Apology 44-^5 and Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 6.42^3 both allow that
certain pagan seers were directly inspired by God, but in Greek texts it would have been
surprising to find Virgil numbered among them. Latin hearers of Constantine would have been
aware that poets of the Augustan era often described themselves as seers or votes, but the claim
is always more flattering to the bal'd himself than to the anonymous source of his inspiration.
6 Cf. Rev. 17.14. There is no evil power in the Eclogue, but Lactantius found the devil,
under the guise of Jupiter, at Georgies 1.126 {D1 5.5).
7 Cf. John 10.17-18. Constantine is here close to affirming the equality of the Father and the
Son.
8 Eclogue 4.37 in fact means ‘when the strength of ages has made thee a man’.
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(that is, when having come to manhood, he eradicates the troubles that beset
human life and brings a peaceful order^ to the whole world).
No sinful crews shall then profane the sea.
The fruitful earth shall yield abundant growth,
Herself unsown, unploughed; nor shall the vine
Desire the sharp edge of the pruning-knife.
Nor shall men dye the fleece, but of itself
The ram shall blaze with unction brought from Tyre
And change drab wool for Sardic indigo.
Come, take the glorious rod of kingly power
From the right hand of thy loud-thundering Sire!
Behold the mighty world, its strong foundations,
The joy of earth, of heaven and of sea.
Glee and the stout heart of unending time!
Would that the boon of strength might give me years
To sing thy deeds, so far as in me lay!
The godlike bard of Thrace^ would not affright me,
Nor Linus, nor Arcadian Pan himself.
No, Pan himself would not bear off the crown.^
Behold, he says, the joy of the mighty world and all the elements.
21 . One of those who lack intelligence might think that this is said of a
human generation. But when a human child is born, in what sense is the
earth unsown and unploughed and the vine not desirous of the edge of the
pruning-knife or any other tendance?'' How could this conceivably have
been said of a human generation? For nature is the minister of the divine
1 Does Constantine have in mind here the injunction to ‘impose the custom of peace’ (or
‘impose custom on peace’) that is given to Rome 3.\.Aeneid 6.852?
2 That is, Orpheus, putative author of many religious and mythological verses. Linus in the
next line is another famous Thracian singer; Pan, a goat-legged god who appears to shepherds,
is also a great singer, as in Theocritus, Idyll 1; Virgil, Eclogue 10 etc.
3 Eclogue 4.38-59. At 4.38 the notion of profanation has been added by the translator. At
4.39 a vague phrase has replaced the name of Jove (i.e. Jupiter). Where Virgil spoke of the
mimdus or heavens at 4.50, the translator echoes Job 38.4, Prov. 8.23 and Isa. 40.21 on the
foundations of the earth. The expression ‘stout heart’ at 4.52 derives from Homer {Iliad 2.851
etc.), the application perhaps being prompted by Empedocles, Fr. 29 DK. 4.58-59 has been
mistranslated, but as the divinity of the nymph Arcadia is left intact, I doubt the suggestion of
Lane Fox (1986), 649 that the translator means to reduce Pan to the status of a mortal.
4 Tarn (1932) none the less contends that the poem was written in honour of the forthcoming
child of Antony and Octavia; when the child proved to be a girl, Antony perhaps applied the
prophecy to his illegitimate son by Cleopatra, Alexander Helios. Nisbet (1978), 69 n. 122 is
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decree/ not the performer of a human bidding. But also the joy of the
elements indicates the descent of a god/ not any human parturition. And the
poet’s prayer that his term of life might he extended is a sign that God is
being invoked; for it is from God that we are accustomed to ask for life and
preservation, not from a human being. Indeed the Erythraean woman says to
God, ‘Why, O Lord, do you impose on me the necessity of prophecy and not
rather, having raised me on high from the earth, sustain me until the most
blessed day of your coming?’^ As for Maro, he appends these words also to
what has been said;
Seeing thy mother’s gentle smile,'* begin
To know her, for she bore thee many months.
Thy parents never smiled on thee by day.
Nor hast thou touched the bed or nuptial feast.^
Eor how could his parents have smiled upon this one, who was their God,
unqualified power without a shape,® circumscribing other things but not
able to show that similar portents attended the birth of Alexander the Great in the romantic
account of his life attributed to Callisthenes.
1 Cf. Constantine on the sovereign laws of nature in his letter to the oriental provinces at
Eusebius, Constantine 1.48.1.
2 Cf. Ps. 98.8, Isa. 55.12. From pagan sources, Nisbet (1978) can cite Nonnus, Dionysiaca
7.344; but the evidence of Nonnus is always suspect, both because of his fifth-century date and
because of his metrical paraphrase of the Fourth Gospel.
3 On the Sibyl’s reluctance to prophesy cf. Virgil, Aeneid 6.77-78; Sibylline Oracles 3.5-6.
Yet Constantine was later to report {Constantine 2.50) that he had heard of a different reason for
the silence of the oracles, namely that the ‘righteous on earth’ had stopped the mouth of Apollo.
4 The closing lines of Eclogue 4 (60-63) have been subject to emendation in both ancient
and modem times. Constantine may have read 4.60 as risentem agnoscere matrem, ‘recognise
your smiling mother’, where Coleman has risu cognoscere matrem.
5 Most editors now read: incipe, parve puer; cui non risere parentes/nec deus hunc mensa,
nec dea dignata cubile (‘begin, little child; the one on whom his parents have not smiled, the
god does not deem him worthy of the table, nor the goddess of the bed’). Edwards (1999b), 259
suggests that Constantine read: incipe, parve puer, cui non risere parentes, nec deus hunc
mensa, nec dea dignata cubile est. This is to assume that hunc (‘this one’) in the second line
refers to the boy who is being addressed with the vocative in the previous one; but Quintilian, a
better rhetorician than Constantine, was willing to tolerate something equally harsh, viz. qui
non risere parenti (‘those who have not smiled on their parent’, which entails a change from
plural to singular in the following line). See Coleman (1977), 149.
6 For the word askhematistos cf. Clement, Stromateis 5.83. The application of privative
terms to God was very common, and a full bouquet of epithets can be found at Arnobius,
Against the Nations 1.31.
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possessing a human body?* And who is unaware that the Holy Spirit has no
experience of the bed?^ What desire or appetite could there be in the
constitution of the Good to which all aspire?^ What is there in common at all
between wisdom and pleasure? But let such statements be left to those who
pursue some human and vulgar education and are unschooled in the divine
education.'* For the latter parade themselves for the sake of display and
glory, whereas the former prepare to purify their souls from every evil deed
and word.
And you yourself I summon as an ally in what I say, O godly piety -
you who are a sort of holy law, the much prayed-for hope of all goods,
teacher of holiness, indefeasible promise of immortality. You I beseech,
piety and love of humankind, and it is to your cures that we who are healed
owe eternal thanks. But the mob, which through its implanted hatred of you
has no experience of your protection, rejects God as well, nor does it have
any notion of the cause of life and being,® that what is proper to the higher
power sustains it^ and the other impious ones. For all the world is his
possession and whatever is in the world.
22. For my part, I ascribe to your goodwill all my good fortune and that of
those who are mine. And the evidence is that everything has turned out accord¬
ing to my prayers - acts of courage, victories, trophies* over my enemies.
Even the great city is conscious of it and gives praise with reverence, while
the people of the most dear city® approve, even if it was deceived by unsafe
1 Cf. Arnobius, Against the Nations 1.31; Origen, On Prayer 23. Constantine means, of
course, that God, qua God, does not have a body; he is not denying the Incarnation, which is
styled a perigraphe or circumscription at Clement of Alexandria, Excerpts from Theodotus 19.
2 Cf. e.g. Origen, Homilies on Leviticus 8.3 on the conception of Christ without carnal
intercourse.
3 Cf. Plato, Republic 509b-c and the God of Aristotle, Metaphysics 1074b-1075a.
4 A distinction between divine and secular wisdom which originates with Philo, e.g. On
Coming Together 74. The utility of a ‘common education’ {enkuklia mathemata) is defended by
Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 1.25-30.
5 Later a title, here (as it would seem) a mere abstraction. Cf. Constantine’s letter to the
provincials of the east at Eusebius, Constantine 2.52.
6 Cf. Acts 17.28.
7 That is, the mob. For the argument that even evil is sustained by good, cf. Augustine, On
the Nature of the Good.
8 The trappings of all panegyric, as we see from 10(2).2; ll(3).19etc.
9 See introduction for the argument that the most dear city, the venue of the Oration, is
Rome. It is not clear whether the great city and the dear one are the same, but the syntax seems
to me to imply a distinction, and I shall argue in Chapter 25 that the former is Nicomedia.
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hopes into choosing a protector unworthy of it, who was suddenly overtaken
in a fitting manner worthy of his atrocities,* one that it is not right to recall,
least of all for me as I speak with you and strive with all solicitude to address
you with holy and auspicious speech. And I shall perhaps say something
neither unseemly nor improper. Be that as it may, there was a time when a
war of surpassing madness and savagery, a war without a treaty,^ was
proclaimed against you hy tyrants,^ O godly piety, and against all your most
holy churches;"* and there were not wanting some in Rome^ who delighted in
the magnitude of these public evils, and a field was prepared for battle.® But
you, coming forward, gave yourselves up, relying on your faith in God.^ And
the savagery of impious mortals, incessantly encroaching like fire, attached
Having assumed the unusual position of an encomiast, the emperor was bound to turn for
precedents to his own courtiers, and Rome appears as the lodestar of his ambitions at Latin
Panegyrics 4(10). 13-14; 12(9). 18-19 etc. The city had of course been accustomed to flattery at
all periods, and we cannot doubt that eulogists of Maxentius will have honoured it with the
same incidental tributes that survive in the panegyrics to his father: Latin Panegyrics 10(2). 13;
ll(3).12etc.
1 Barnes (1976a), 422, proposing Serdica as the venue, surmises that the allusion is to the
death of Galerius there in 311, which would still be remembered when Constantine retired to
this ‘second Rome’ in 316. The identification is, of course, less probable if the speech was
delivered as late as 321, as Baimes (1981) now holds. Even in 316 the deaths of Maximinus and
Maxentius might have effaced Galerius from popular recollection.
2 Although the locution polemos aspondos is used by Eusebius only of the war declared
against Constantine by Licinius in 321 {Constantine 1.50), it is conventional enough to be
applied to any conflict which the speaker wishes to paint in stronger colours.
3 The word here beai's its usual Greek meaning of usuiper or unconstitutional ruler. It is
used by Constantine of his pagan predecessors in edicts of repeal, e.g. Theodosian Code
15.14.4, which Corcoran (1996), 157 regards as the epitome of an oration to the Senate.
4 It is not clear whether piety is here used as a title of the Roman Church or of the whole
Church catholic. In either case, we see that, just as Constantine has attributed to Christ the
magnanimity and philanthropy that would grace an earthly ruler, so he credits the Church here
with the virtue that would commonly be ascribed to the subject of a royal panegyric: cf. Latin
Panegyrics 11 (3). 11 etc.
5 Lane Fox (1986), 778 n. 16 contends that if Rome is openly named here it cannot be the
‘most dear city’ of the preceding paragraph. In reply Edwards (1999b), 266 quotes Latin
Panegyrics 10(2)1.1 and 2.1, where an honorific sobriquet for the capital is followed by the
name.
6 On my reading, this is the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, on the eve of which
Constantine beheld the Cross in a dream as a pledge of victory.
7 No popular demonstration of this kind is recorded for Serdica in 316/7 or 321 (Baimes),
Antioch in 324 (De Decker, Lane Fox), Thessalonica in 324 (Piganiol) or Byzantium in 325
(Mazzarino); but on the reception of Constantine in Rome in 312 cf. Eusebius, Constantine 1.39
and Latin Panegyrics 4(10)11.2.
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to you a marvellous glory,* worthy of everlasting song. For awe took hold of
those who beheld, on the one hand the executioners and tormentors of the
bodies of the pious growing faint and struggling in the face of terrors,^ and
on the other the chains loosed, the very tortures relaxed, the burnings
diminishing as they were applied, the hardiness in toil of God’s indomitable
servants who compromised their freedom of speech^ not even for a moment.
What profit was there for you in this atrocity, O monster of impiety?'^
And what was it that made you lose your wits?^ You will say that it was
honour towards the gods.® What gods are these? Or what sort of conception
have you that is worthy of the divine nature? If they were as you thought,
you ought to have treated their rulings with amazement, rather than obeying
the shameless decrees of those who unrighteously demanded the sacrifices
of the righteous.^ Or perhaps you will say, because of ancestral custom and
1 Cf. 2 Cor. 4.17, which promises a ‘more exceeding and eternal weight of glory’ after light
and momentary affliction.
2 An earthly premonition of the divine reversal promised by Tertullian, On the Shows 30.
3 As Van Unnik (1962) explains, parrhesia is a term of some importance in the New
Testament, denoting first the outspokenness of Christ (Mark 8.32), then the dauntless
proclamation of the gospel by the apostles (2 Cor. 3.12), and finally the enfranchisement of
Christians in the kingdom of the next world. It retained its significance also in the instruction of
catechumens, as is clear from Van Unnik (1962).
4 The chapter heading at p. 183.2 Heikel identifies this tyrant as Maximinus, who died in
313 as the opponent of both Constantine and Licinius. Barnes (1976a) emends to Maximian,
another name for Galerius, but Lane Fox (1986), 633-35 argues that Eusebius (or his editor) is
correct. Drake (1985) also accepts the authority of the manuscript reading, and advances the
theory that Constantine, addressing a Roman audience, is alluding to the letters of Maximian to
Maxentius, which were discovered after Constantine entered Rome, and exposed his rival as a
supporter of persecution.
5 Assimilating the tyrant to Nebuchadnezzar (Dan. 4.30-34) and Herod Agrippa (Acts
12.21-23). Galerius appeared to have suffered the most condign affliction, dying in the manner
of Herod Agrippa and Antiochus Epiphanes (Eusebius, Church History 8.16.2), but Maximinus,
overthrown by Licinius in the name of God and dying slowly of his own poison, gave more open
testimony when he implored the mercy of Christ (Eusebius, Church History 9.10.13 and
Constantine 1.58-59; Lactantius, Pers. 49).
6 As Maximinus did in the edicts summarized by Corcoran (1996), 149-50; see Eusebius,
Church History 9.7.3-14 and 9.9.1. Lactantius, Pers. 10.6 reports that Diocletian’s advisers
regarded Christians as enemies of the gods
7 The tyrant is assumed to be relying on the same response from Apollo which provoked
persecution under Diocletian at Eusebius, Constantine 2.50-51. See note on Daphne at Chapter
18.
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the verdict of humanity.* I agree. Eor the customs are very close to these
proceedings, and come from the very same insanity. You thought perhaps
that there was some eminent power in human forms carved by carpenters
and craftsmen.^ No doubt you spoke to them,^ taking great solicitude lest
they be soiled - great and eminent gods who needed human solicitude!'*
23. Examine our mode of worship against your own.^ Is there not here true
unanimity and enduring love of humankind, with reproach of lapses
bringing not destruction but correction,® a regimen not of savagery but of
salvation and strict faith first toward God, then toward the natural
community of humankind, and pity for those embattled with misfortune, a
simple life which does not cloak its wickedness in any variegated cunning,
and knowledge of the true God and his monarchy?^ This is true godly piety,
this is strict worship, utterly unblemished, this is a prudent life, whose
followers advance toward eternal life as by some sacred highway.* For no-
one wholly dies if he keeps on with such a life and purifies his soul from
his body; he does not so much die as fulfil the ministry decreed for him by
God. For the one who confesses God does not become an instrument of
insult or of passion, but, nobly enduring necessity,® has the trial of his
fortitude as a passport to goodwill from God. For there is no doubt that the
1 A point stressed in the edict of Galerius at Lactantius, Pers. 34 and Eusebius, Church
History 8.17.4. Moraux (1954), II, cites Collation of Roman and Mosaic Laws 6.4.1, 6.4.3 and
15.3.2 to illustrate the appeal to antiquity, together with the ironic comments of Lactantius at DI
5.19.3.
2 Cf. Isa. 45.6.
3 He may be thinking of Diocletian’s embassy to the oracle of Apollo, which returned the
answer that he was prevented from speaking the truth by ‘the righteous on the earth’ (Eusebius,
Constantine 2.50). The speechlessness of idols was a biblical commonplace: 1 Kgs 18.26-27,
Isa. 45.7.
4 Both Minucius Felix {Octavius 24) and Tertullian {Apology 29.1-2) had sneered at the
inability of the gods to protect their images and shrines.
5 A common challenge in apologetic, beginning with Josephus, Against Apion 2.150.
6 Cf. Gal. 6.1 on the restoration of a brother ‘taken in a fault’.
7 As we learn from Tertullian, Against Praxeas 3, the monarchy or sole rule of God was a
premiss of all theology in the Latin west. It could also be the foundation of an analogy between
the divine economy and the power of a single ruler on earth, be he spiritual or secular. See
Fowden (1993) on imperial government, Brent (1995) on the papacy.
8 Perhaps a reminiscence of the old trope of the two ways, on which see now Aldridge
(1999). But Constantine may also have in mind the dry-shod crossing of the Red Sea (see
Chapter 16). For a parallel with Eusebius, Tricennial 216.3 see Edwards (1999b), 275 n. 83.
9 Meaning no doubt the will of God revealed in suffering; cf. Luke 22.22, Acts 22.23.
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divine^ welcomes human virtue. It would indeed be one of the greatest
absurdities if human beings, when they happen to receive benefits either from
their superiors or their inferiors in authority should be grateful for whatever
relief their benefactors happen to have given them, and give benefits in
return, while the one who is over all and ruler of all and the Good itself^
should neglect the recompense. This is the one who accompanies the whole
of our lives, and is present to us at whatever time we do any good, who
immediately gives benefits when one receives courage and uprightness, but
postpones the full measure of his recompense until the full measure of our
lives. For the whole verdict on a life is determined at that time when the
body is forsaken by the soul, and the soul itself, in unblemished purity,
approaches the pure and unblemished divinity.^ This then is divine
righteousness, and this the test of the righteous, when the faith and
continence of a whole life are brought to trial. And when it is well with
these, the reward of eternal life follows, but the fitting retribution pursues
the wicked.''
24. I put the question to you now, Decius,^ you who trampled upon the toils
of the just in hatred of the church and appointed retribution for those who
lived a holy life: how do you fare now after your life? What kind of state are
you in, what miseries surround you? The time between life and death
showed your good fortune, when, falling with all your army on the Scythian
fields,® you led the renowned power of Rome to contempt against the
1 Cf. Constantine’s usage of the term theion (more usual in pagan than in Christian allusions
to the Deity) at Eusebius, Constantine 2.28. The term is often applied to the gods as arbiters of
mundane affairs: e.g. Herodotus, Histories 1.32, Plotinus, Enneads 2.3.9. The Latin equivalent
is perhaps divinitas or numen: see L.J. Hall (1998) on the ambiguity of the terms in which the
faith of Constantine was proclaimed to the west.
2 After a reminiscence of Eph. 4.6, the Father is once again equated with the Platonic Good
of Republic 509 etc.
3 Again, as in Chapter 13, ignoring the resurrection of the body. The precept that we should
not call anyone happy before his death was made proverbial by Herodotus, Histories 1.33.
4 Cf. the bombastic assertion of this unconvincing platitude in Constantine’s letter to
Palestine at Eusebius, Constantine 2.27.
5 Cf. Lactantius, Pers. 4. Roman emperor from 249-51 AD, Decius is generally credited
with the first general persecution of the Christians. As Rives (1999) is the latest to observe, the
terms of his edict or edicts remain unclear and the Church may have been a casualty, rather than
the intended target, of a decree ordaining universal sacrifice.
6 In fact, as we see from Aurelius Victor, Caesars 29, Decius fell in battle while pursuing the
Goths who had crossed the river Danube from the north. See Bird’s commentary on Aurelius
Victor (1994), 128-31 for the ancient authorities on this poorly documented reign.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
Getae.' But you Valerian, who showed the same murder-lust toward those
who heeded God, you made the holy judgment manifest when you were
caught and led as a prisoner in bonds with your very purple and all your
royal pomp, and finally, flayed and pickled at the behest of Sapor the King
of the Persians, you were set up as an eternal trophy^ of your own mis¬
fortune!^ And you too Aurelian, beacon of all injustices, how conspicuously,
when you were traversing Thrace in your madness, you were cut down
midway and filled the furrows of the road with impious blood!"*
25. And Diocletian after the murder-lust of his persecution, having voted
himself down, unwittingly renounced himself as one unworthy of power,
and confessed the harmfulness of his folly in the confines of one
contemptible dwelling!^ What good did it bring to this man to have kindled
1 The Goths of northern Europe and the Getae of Thrace were frequently confused because
of the likeness of names; here the Thracian seat of war facilitates the error. The Scythians of the
Russian steppes are superimposed on the Getae in the lordly manner of Ovid, From Pontus
1.106-08. Greek authors tend to be more fastidious, since the Thracians were their neighbours
and the Scythians sometimes resident in their cities.
2 To be contrasted with the trophies secured by Constantine in Chapter 22.
3 Lactantius, Pers. 5 describes the same episode with uncharitable relish; the Augustan
History, Valerian 7, can only attribute the fall of so good a man to a ‘certain necessity’.
Although he temporarily rescinded the edict of Decius and restored the property taken from the
Church, Valerian (253-60) returned to persecution in 257, allegedly at the instance of his
adviser Macrianus (Eusebius, Church History 7.10.4). Constantine ignores the role of the
satellite, just as he ignores the widespread belief that Diocletian’s persecution was instigated by
Galerius. This silence might appear to confirm the scepticism of Davies (1989), who argues that
Galerius has been cast in the role of Macrianus by our Christian witnesses; it is possible,
however, that as an emperor reciting the acts of his predecessors, Constantine thought that the
dignity of his office would be best preserved by adhering to the official record rather than to a
secret history.
4 Both Lactantius {Pers. 6) and Eusebius {Church History 7.30.20-21) report that Aurelian
(270-275) was mediating a persecution of Christians at the time of his death. The claim is not
absurd, as Aurelian might have seen the cult of Christ as a rival to that of the unconquered Sun,
which he himself was promulgating. It is, however, possible that Christians, in the manner of
the Old Testament Book of Chronicles, invented a reason known to God for the fall of an
otherwise estimable ruler. The Augustan History, Aurelian 41 and 43 hesitates whether to
include Aurelian among the best or merely among the mediocre emperors.
5 On 1 May 305, after a reign of twenty years, Diocletian reached the apogee of
statesmanship by laying aside his power, and forcing his reluctant colleague Maximian to do
likewise. He was succeeded by Galerius, his own crown prince or Caesar, in the east, while the
authority of Maximian passed in the same way to Constantins, father of Constantine.
Constantine exaggerates the pains of abdication, which he treats as a divine punishment rather
than as an act of statesmanship. It was painful to Christian authors to observe that, while
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THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
59
war against our God?' I suppose that of passing the rest of his life in fear of
the thunderbolt. Nicomedia tells it, and the witnesses are not silent, of whom
I happen to be one.^ For I saw him cry out, when he was mentally enfeebled
and in fear of every sight and sound, that the cause of the evils surrounding
him had been his own folly when he invoked against himself God’s protection
of the just.^ Nevertheless the palace and his house were destroyed, after the
dispensation of the thunderbolt and the fire from heaven.'' The outcome of
these actions had indeed been foretold by people of intelligence. And they
did not keep silent or hide their misery over the undeserved events, but
evidently and publicly they spoke with freedom^ to one another:
‘What great madness is this? What arrogance it was in the sovereign
power that human beings should dare to make war on God, should wish
to rage drunkenly against the most holy and righteous form of worship
and to contrive the destruction of righteous people in such great numbers
when there was no antecedent wrongdoing.® And this when times were
Diocletian suffered obloquy, he failed to die in a manner that passed judgment on his sins. On
his return to humble status see Lactantius, Pers. 19.5; on his chagrin at being alive to witness the
destruction of his statues see Pers. 42.
1 Cf. Constantine’s denunciation of the persecutors in his letter to Palestine at Eusebius,
Constantine 2.25.
2 Lactantius, Pers. 18.10 attests the presence of Constantine in Nicomedia in 305, though
not in 303. Barnes (1976b) argues that if Constantine had accompanied Diocletian on his earlier
campaign he would have remained in Nicomedia on his return. Be that as it may, the speech that
follows would be patently fictitious, even without the biblical allusions and the implied
justification of Constantine.
3 Perhaps a variant on the report of the oracle which Constantine relates at Constantine
2.50; Lactantius, Pers. 10.7 implies that it was already common knowledge. It is possible that
the Augustan History, Valerian 42, is mocking such claims to private information when the
putative author alleges that his father had overheard and taken note of Diocletian’s political
maxims even before he seized the throne (and therefore even before his name was Diocletian).
4 Lactantius, Pers. 14.2 holds Galerius accountable for the fire, which he blamed on the
Christians. Constantine’s description, recalling his account of the destruction of Assyria, is
perhaps symbolic: cf. Gen. 19.24, 1 Kgs 1.10, Luke 9.54. He thus exonerates the Christians
from the charge of arson by making God himself the incendiary. Cf. the comparison of
Maxentius to Pharaoh in Eusebius, Constantine 1.38, entailing an obscurely metaphorical
account of his overthrow.
5 See note at Chapter 22 on parrhesia, which signifies here a defiant frankness in the
neighbourhood of an evil ruler.
6 Cf. the (possibly spurious) rescript of Hadrian quoted at the end of Justin, lApoIogy,
which advises that no prosecutions should be brought against the Christians unless they had
committed other wrongs. On the hollow pretexts of the persecutors, cf. Constantine’s letter to
Palestine at Eusebius, Constantine 2.26.2.
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prosperous/ both privately and publicly, when all things were proceeding
well and unanimity prevailed among the sovereigns/ There will be a requital
for this, there will be judgment for the blood unjustly poured,^ and perhaps
indeed the same misfortune will overtake both the blameworthy and the
blameless. For the divine"* is justly indignant with the wicked.’
And when they said this, their conjectures were not improbable. For they
beheld a great and excessive savagery, since when everything that savagery
is disposed to conceive was exhausted, impiety went after obscene punish¬
ments. For the aforesaid king^ judged that holy virgins and respectable
women should suffer the outrage of insolence, summoning the young men to
pleasure with shameful ordinances.® In this case the self-restraint of the
commoners was superior to the incontinence’ of the tyrant. For no-one gave
himself up to unholy passion, and the sentence of the king was unable to
overthrow the discretion of the people. O what an excellent custodian of the
law, what a teacher of discretion to all his subjects, O what concern the army
showed for its own citizens! Those who had never seen the backs of their
enemies in the battle-line pierced the breasts of their compatriots!® For all
that, at last the providence® of God came to judge the unholy deeds, not
indeed without harm to the people: there was slaughter on a scale that, had it
1 For the claim that Diocletian’s persecution destroyed the prosperity of his reign cf.
Eusebius, Church History 8.13.9; Lactantius, Pers. 9.11-12; Constantine at Eusebius,
Constantine 2.54.
2 Constantine wishes to intimate that the discord which arose after his usurpation in 306
could be traced to the godless policy of his predecessors rather than to his personal ambition.
3 Cf. Gen. 4.10 on the blood of Abel crying from the ground.
4 A more natural expression in the mouth of a pagan than in that of a Christian: see Chapter
23.
5 In Latin the use of rex (‘king’) was generally pejorative, as it commemorated the rule of
the Etruscans which was ended in 509 by the expulsion of the last Tarquin and the establishment
of republican institutions. The rape of a married woman was the fatal crime which felled the
Etimscan dynasty.
6 Standai'd allegations, though not elsewhere brought against Diocletian. Cf. Eusebius,
Church History 8.14.2 on Maximinus, Constantine 1.33-34 on Maxentius and Constantine
1.55.2 on Licinius; Lactantius, Pers. 38.1 on Maximinus. Christians such as Minucius Felix
{Octavius 25) pointed out that Rome was founded and populated with the help of similar
atrocities.
7 The chai'acteristic vice of a tyrant in ancient literature, as at Plato, Republic 578a.
8 A similar jibe is attributed by Lactantius, Pers. 13.2 to the Christian Euetius, who tore
down the first decree against the Christians.
9 The term now implies an interest in the course of history, not merely in the cosmic
regularities which were the subject of pronoia when discussed by Greek philosophers.
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THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
61
occurred among barbarians, would have sufficed to bring about eternal
peace. For the whole army of the aforesaid king, subject to the authority of
some good-for-nothing who had seized the Roman Empire by force,* was
exterminated by many wars of all kinds.^
But what more clear and obvious token of divine judgment could be
advanced? The world itself cries out, and the pageant of the stars shines
brighter and more conspicuous, rejoicing (as I believe) in the fitting
judgment of unholy deeds. The very times that succeed the wild and
inhumane life are reckoned to rejoice because of their own good lot, and
show the goodwill of God toward humankind. While as for the invocations
of God by those who were being oppressed and longed for their natural
liberty,^ and their praises of thanksgiving to God after the release from evils,
when liberty and their contract with justice had been restored to them, how
do these fail to delineate in every way the providence of God and his
affection for humankind?
26 . But when they praise my service,'* which commenced with the
inspiration of God, do they not confirm that God is the cause of my feats?
Absolutely. For it is God’s prerogative to decree the best things, and that of
human beings to obey God. Now in my view a ministry is most lovely and
excellent when someone, before the attempt, ensures that what is done will
be secure.^ And all human beings know that the most holy devotion of these
hands is owed to God with pure faith of the strictest kind, and that all that has
been accomplished with advantage is achieved by joining the hands in
prayers and litanies, with as much private and public assistance as everyone
1 Barnes (1976a), 422 identifies this person as Licinius, later arguing at (1981), 323 that the
speech must therefore follow the rupture in 321. Lane Fox (1986), 632 endorses this deduction
as confirmation of his own dating of the speech to 324. Nothing, however, prevents us from
supposing that this prodigal is once again Maximinus; he cannot have been Maxentius, since, as
Drake (1985) observes, he never took charge of Diocletian’s troops.
2 On wars as a minous consequence of impiety cf. Constantine at Eusebius, Constantine
2.27.1.
3 That is, citizens. On the abridgement of their rights to litigation under Diocletian’s edicts
see Corcoran (1996), 180.
4 For the term huperesia cf. Eusebius, Constantine 2.28. Constantine also styles himself
God’s servant or instrument at Constantine 2.64, Gelasius of Cyzicus, Church History 2.7.35
and Optatus, Against the Donatists, Appendix 5. Elliott (1992) deduces from the Greek
passages that Constantine professed to have been acting in the cause of God before his march on
Rome in 312.
5 Cf. Euke 14.28 on the cost of war and fortification.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
might pray for on his own behalf and that of those dearest to him. They
indeed have witnessed the battles and observed the war in which God’s
providence awarded victory to the people, and have seen God co-operating
with our prayers. Eor righteous prayer is an invincible thing,' and no-one
who pays holy adoration is disappointed of his aim. Eor no place is left for
disappointment, except where faith’s part fails, since God is always present
with goodwill to welcome human goodness. Thus it is human to lapse
sometimes, but God is not to be blamed for human lapses.^ Those who
pursue piety should, however, confess their gratitude to the Saviour of all for
our own salvation and the good state of public affairs, and petition Christ for
one another with holy prayers and litanies,^ that he may continue his benefits
to us. Eor he is an unconquerable ally and defender of the righteous, he
himself is the best judge, the guide to immortality, the bestower of eternal
life.
The fifth book of Eusebius Pamphilus'* on the life of Constantine the
king.^
1 Cf. James 5.16.
2 Cf. Plato, Republic 617e: ‘the blame is with the one who chooses; God is not to blame’.
3 As for Origen, On Prayer 14.4—15.1, Christ remains primarily the recipient of petitions.
4 Eusebius took the name Pamphilus in memory of his teacher, a fellow-lover of Origen
who also became a martyr.
5 Here the word ‘king’, being written by a Greek-speaking annotator, carries no pejorative
sense.
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HERE BEGINS THE COMING' OF THE HOLY CROSS
In the year 233,^ when God’s servant^ the great man Constantine was
reigning, in the sixth year of this reign,^ a great host of barbarians^ gathered
1 The Latin is adventus rather than inventio, though the latter would be a more accurate
translation of the word heuresis which appears in the title of the Greek work. Perhaps the noun
is intended as an allusion not only to the vision of Constantine, but to his subsequent exaltation
of the Cross when he entered Rome in 312: see Dufraigne (1997), 73-83. Borgehammar (1991),
151 and 241-42 surmises that there was once a separate narrative of the Vision. See note on
closing rubric also.
2 Borgehammar (1991), 181-82 is no doubt correct to argue that this means the 233rd year
since the accession of Trajan on 28 January, 98. The edition of A.D. Holder (1889), 15 credits
Eberhard Nestle with this conjecture; see further Nestle (1889), 41^2 on the burial of the Cross
under Trajan. Drijvers and Drijvers (1997), 55 remark that one of the Syriac versions, which
says that the Cross was recovered for a second time by Helena, is alluding to the legend that
Protonike, the wife of the Emperor Claudius, was the first to unearth the trophy, which was then
consigned to earth again under Trajan. By the reckoning explained below, the second year of
this emperor began with the month of Easter in 98, and the Easter of 329 marks the inception of
his 233rd year.
3 Constantine styles himself a servant of God in a letter at Eusebius, Constantine 2.55 and
is followed in this by Eusebius, Constantine 1.2. Cameron and Hall (1999), 186 and 188
observe that the term is in keeping with Eusebius’ assimilation of Constantine to Moses, and,
since Moses was the first to win a battle with the sign of the Cross (Exod. 17.11-12), this
parallel would not be out of place in the present work.
4 In the Syriac version it is the seventh year and in the month of Kanun. This is the second
in the Palmyrene calendar, according to Samuel (1972), 179. Constantine became undisputed
master of the Empire on 8 November in 324, and since the present text appears to date the year
from Nisan, the month of Easter, his sixth year will have commenced in the second quarter of
329. Nisan is the seventh month in the Palmyrene reckoning, and if it began as late as 24 May
(cf. Samuel (1972), 176 on Heliopolis), the first Kanun of the emperor’s reign would commence
in late December 324. In that case, by the Palmyrene computation, it would fall in the second
year of Constantine, which would already have begun in late November. Kanun of the seventh
year in Palmyra would span late December and early January of 329/30, though for the Latin
text translated here the seventh year would not begin until Easter 330. A mediaeval Latin
version of the legend confirms that the miracle took place in ‘January of the seventh year’:
Borgehammar (1991), 282. It may not be an accident that Constantine’s conversion has been
assigned to the Christmas season.
5 The barbarians are not named in the Latin text. See Zosimus 2.21 (perhaps also Eusebius,
Constantine 4.6, though the date is vague) for the battle against the Sarmatians which appears
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
and came over the Danube in preparation for war against the Roman state.*
Now this was announced to king Constantine Augustus,^ and he also
gathered a multitude of troops, and set out to join issue with them, and he
found those who had crossed into Roman territory and were over the Danube.
Now when Constantine Augustus saw that the multitude [of barbarians]
was beyond counting, he was deeply distressed and sorely afraid. But that
very night, there came to him a man in great splendour,^ who roused him
and said to him, ‘Constantine, do not be afraid,'* but look up again into
heaven and behold!’ And gazing up into heaven, he beheld the sign of the
Cross of Christ, formed out of brilliant light, and above was inscribed this
rubric in letters: In this sign? Thereupon Constantine Augustus made a
likeness of the Cross that he had seen in the sky, then took the sign and had
to be commemorated here. An earlier victory (305/6) over this tribe is alleged in the little work
On the Origin of Constantine 4, but this event could not be said to have fallen in the sixth or
seventh year of Constantine on any chronology of his reign. The same is true of the success in
307 deduced by Baimes (1976c), 149 from the place of the title Sarmaticus in an inscription.
The Sarmatians, a tribe on the north-eastern frontier of the Empire, acquired an excessive
prominence in Christian hagiography of Constantine and his family, perhaps, as Lieu suggests,
because they were confounded with the Persians: Lieu and Montserrat (1996), 142 nn. 2 and 3.
1 A Byzantine life of Constantine, dating from the ninth century according to Lieu and
Montserrat (1996), 102, records at chapter 25 (p. 128 Lieu and Montserrat) that Constantine
saw a third vision of the Cross when he bridged the Danube in defiance of the ‘Scythians’. The
second vision occuiTed before the capture of Byzantium, and these three divine signals
therefore marked the three great victories of his career (see ch. 3, p. 139 Lieu and Montserrat).
2 The title ‘king’ is biblical, rex being a term distasteful to all writers of classical Latin
because it was reminiscent of the Etruscan rulers who had been expelled from the city in 509
BC. Augustus had been the standard title of emperors since 27 BC, and was first assumed by
Constantine, without legal forms, on the death of his father Constantins in 306 AD (see
Lactantius, Pers. 24).
3 The angel does not figure in other accounts, but would typically be required in the Old
Testament at a moment of vocation: see e.g. Josh. 5.14, 1 Sam. 13.6.
4 A typical salutation; see e.g. Luke 2.10.
5 Eusebius, Constantine 1.28 reports, on the emperor’s sworn word, that in the course of the
campaign which led to the capture of Rome, he saw in the early afternoon a Cross above the
sun, ‘formed out of light’, which bore the rubric. Conquer by this. What is described, however,
is not so much the Cross as a labarum, a combination of the Greek characters X and P, which
Eusebius construes as the first two letters of Christ’s name, although pagans might have
recognized here an icon of the sun. For Lactantius, Pers. 44 it is again a form of the labarum that
his hero sees at the Milvian bridge on the eve of his battle for Rome; Prudentius, Against
Symmachus 1.487 confirms both the location and the nature of the sign.
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THE COMING OF THE HOLY CROSS
65
it put in the van,' and making an onset with his troops against the
barbarians, he fell upon them the following dawn; and the barbarians were
afraid and took to flight through the mists of the Danube. And no small
number perished, and God in that day gave victory to King Constantine
through the power of the Holy Cross.
Now when King Constantine came to his own city,^ he summoned all the
priests of all the gods or idols, and inquired of them what god this sign was
or to what god it belonged; and they could not tell him.^ There remained,
however, one of them, who said to him, ‘This is the sign of the God of heaven’.
A few Christians who were present at that time'' came to King Constantine
and preached to him the mystery of the Trinity and the advent of the Son of
God, how he was bom and cmcified and on the third day rose from the dead.^
1 The Latin has infronte, which is inelegant and ambiguous; but Borgehammar (1991), 220
cites an alternative version which states that the Cross ‘went before' the ai'my, and that is also
the meaning of the Syriac. Lactantius, Pers. 44 reports that, by divine admonition, Constantine
had the ‘sign of Christ’ inscribed on his soldiers’ shields; Eusebius, Constantine 1.37 says that
the Cross was carried at the head of Constantine’s troops in his engagement with Maxentius.
2 To judge by the sequel this means Rome and not Byzantium. But Constantine entered
Rome in 312.
3 Compare Dan. 4.18-19 and 5.14—17, where the Babylonian kings apply in vain to their
own advisers, and discover that only Daniel the Jew can expound their visions. Such literary
somersaults, reversing the position of the Gentiles with regard to the Jews, are common in the
literature of the early Church, prefigured as they were by Paul himself at Gal. 4.24.
4 At Drijvers and Drijvers (1997), 54 the Syriac says that Christians in the army were known
as Nazarenes. This is usually the word for a Palestinian sect originating with converts from
Judaism; perhaps the author means to anticipate the story of Judas. The service of Christians
under pagan generals is attested with reluctance in Tertullian’s On the Soldier’s Crown (third
century), happily if not honestly by Eusebius in his tale of the ‘Thundering Legion’ {Church
History 5.5) and more credibly in Lactantius’ account of Diocletian’s purge in 297 {Pers. 10).
The Roman legionary was by occupation a citizen of the world, and so perhaps by inclination a
monotheist; thus Maximinus Daia and Licinius fought each other in the name of different
universal gods: Lactantius, Mort. 46^7.
5 All these had been essentials of the Christian faith since apostolic times: see Rom. 1.3 and
1 Cor. 15.3. The author will of course have been familiar with the epitome of Christian belief
called the Apostles’ creed, which seems to have originated in Rome in or before the mid-fourth
century, as well as with the formularies issued at the Councils of Nicaea in 325, Constantinople
in 381 and Chalcedon in 451. Even the simplest creed would have informed the king that Christ
was the son of God, that he came down for our salvation, that he ascended and will come again
in judgment, and that the Church also confesses the Holy Spirit, the remission of sins by
baptism and the resurrection to everlasting life. If the ‘Nicene Symbol’ of 325 or its successor,
the more familiar ‘Nicene Creed’, had been employed in his instruction he would also have
learned that the Son was consubstantial with the Father, true God from God, begotten and not
made. These were not stated doctrines of the Church before the Council of Nicaea in 325.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
Then King Constantine sent to Eusebius the bishop of Rome,' and caused
him to come to him, and [Eusebius] instructed him in the whole of the
Christian faith, and taught him the mysteries of all things^ in the name of
Our Lord Jesus Christ;^ and, when assured of his faith, he enjoined him to
build churches of Christ everywhere,'' but bade him destroy the temples of
the idols.^
®Now the blessed Constantine was perfect in the faith and served in the
Holy Spirit, and became versed in the holy gospels of Jesus Christ. When he
had learnt where the Cross of the Lord is,’ he sent his mother Helena* to seek
1 A Eusebius was bishop of Rome in 308-9, but on no chronology can he be the man
intended, and Constantine did not become a Christian at that time. Drijvers and Drijvers (1997),
23 suggest that the name Rome is a misinterpretation of the Syriac word Rum, which designates
the Roman Empire. If, as is generally held, it was Eusebius of Nicomedia who baptized the
dying Constantine (Jerome, Chronicle, ad 337), it is no surprise that an author who aimed at
orthodoxy should (consciously or unconsciously) have substituted his namesake, for Eusebius
of Nicomedia had signed the creed of 325 reluctantly, and was exiled for his refusal to endorse
the anathemas appended to it. Fowden (1994b), 161 traces the name Eusebius of Rome as early
as 460 in the (lost) work of the historian Agathangelos.
2 It is not clear what the king had still to hear if he had already imbibed the mysteries of the
Trinity, as the text above declares. After 451 the Chalcedonian definition of the person of Christ
as fully God and fully man, though not contained in any creed, was thought by the dominant
party in Byzantium, and by everyone in the Latin west, to be binding on the whole Church.
3 The author no doubt means that he was baptized in the triple name of Father, Son and Holy
Spirit, as at Matt. 28.19. The older form, represented in Acts 2.38, was generally superseded by
the time of Constantine, though, to judge by Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition 21.19, anointing in
the single name survived in Rome until the third century. It is possible that Eusebius of
Nicomedia, unwilling as he was to admit that the Father and Son were both God, would have
eschewed the Trinitarian formula; historical verisimilitude is not, however, a point of great
concern with the present author.
4 Constantine was extolled as a founder of sacred buildings even before his conversion to
Christianity at Latin Panegyrics 6(7).22. His labours as a Christian are rehearsed by Eusebius,
Constantine 3.47—51.
5 Paulinus, Letter 31 asserts that this destruction was earned out under Helena’s auspices.
Eusebius, Constantine 3.54-58 implies that most of the demolitions took place after her death.
6 At this point a group of manuscripts includes an account of the burial of the Cross and the
erection of a temple of Aphrodite above it, which seems to depend on Eusebius’s Onomasticon
or else the Church History of Rufinus and is later presupposed in the present narrative. See
Borgehammar (1991), 302 and Taylor (1998), 190-91.
7 This means, presumably, in Jeiusalem, since all the rest remained to be discovered.
8 In the following sentence, as in the Greek, it is clear that Helena undertakes the mission of
her own accord. Thus we seem to see here a clumsy attempt to join two narratives originally
discrete. The Latin version implies, more clearly than the Greek, that Helena was converted at
the instance of her son; cf. Eusebius, Constantine 3.47, as well as Constantine’s allusions to his
pagan upbringing in Oration 11.
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THE COMING OF THE HOLY CROSS
67
the holy wood of the Cross of Our Lord, and to build in the same place a
church of the Lord.' Now the grace of the Holy Spirit reposed in the blessed
Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine. She versed herself in every
mansion^ of the scriptures of the Lord, and possessed an intense love of our
Lord Jesus Christ. Later indeed she also sought out the saving wood of the
Holy Cross. Now when she had read intently about the advent of salvation^
in our Saviour Jesus Christ and the erection of his Cross and resurrection of
the dead, she could not live with herself until she had also found the victori¬
ous wood of Christ’s Cross, on which the body of the Lord had been fixed.
Now this is the way she found it.'' On the twenty-eighth day of the
second month^ she entered the holy city of Jerusalem and then convened the
vile® mob of Jews, not only from^ Jerusalem but from the neighbouring
cities, castles and estates, so that the total of Jews was found to be three
thousand.* To these the blessed Eternal® one said, T have learned from the
holy prophets that you were beloved of God, but because'® all of you, spurn¬
ing wisdom," poured curses on the one who wished to redeem you from the
curse, you abused him who cleansed your eyes from unclean spirits with his
1 The constnaction of this building is reported by Rufmus, Church History 10.8.
2 John 14.2.
3 Or ‘the advent of humanity’, reading the apparatus in Holder, p. 17. Borgehammai'(1991),
238 suggests that this is a clumsy rendering of the greek enanthropesis (‘becoming man’), which,
unlike the alternative ensarkosis (‘incarnation’), cannot be rendered by a single Latin word.
4 Paulinus of Nola, Letter 31 appears to be the earliest witness to Helena’s convocation of
the ‘most learned among the Jews’. Though he does not name Judas, the hero of the present
narrative, he also shows no acquaintance with the rival account in which it is Bishop Macarius
of Jerusalem who counsels Helena.
5 In the Syriac at Drijvers and Drijvers (1997), 56 the month is lyas, eighth in the Palmyrene
calendar and the first after Nisan, in which the Easter celebration falls. The Latin therefore
appears to be dating the months from Eastertide, just as the Jews began the year with Nisan.
6 The epithet impiissima is not found in the Greek.
7 This construction also is unparalleled in the Greek; in general the diction of the Latin
tends to the hyperbolic.
8 A small number, as the Syriac observes: Drijvers and Drijvers (1997), 56-57 cite testimony
that Hadrian was held to have been responsible for the desertion of the territory. Nevertheless,
Stemberger (2000), 17 accepts an estimate of 700,000 Jews in the whole territory of Palestine in
140 AD; even if the majority lived in Galilee, there would be fai* more than 3,000 in Judaea.
9 Aetema being no doubt a scribal error for Aelena, one form of the empress’s name.
10 Introducing a more complex sentence than we find in the Greek.
11 Paul avers at 1 Cor. 17—30 that God confuted the wisdom of the world by the folly of
preaching, and above all by the crucifixion, whereby Christ became the wisdom of God for us.
Reminiscences of Jewish ‘wisdom literature’ (Prov. 8.22, Wis. 7.25-26) reinforced the
Christian tendency to use ‘Wisdom’ as an appellation of Christ (cf. also Luke 11.49).
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
spittle,' and you handed over to death the one who raised your dead,^ you
have once and for all exchanged light for shadows and truth for falsehood.^
Upon you has fallen the curse that is written in your scriptures/ Now,
however, choose from among yourselves men who have diligently learned
your law, so that they may answer me about the matters on which I shall
interrogate them.’
Having withdrawn in fear, and held a long debate among themselves,
they found those men who claimed to have learned the law well to be a
thousand in number. And they brought them to the blessed Helena,
producing on their behalf the testimonials that they had a deep knowledge of
the law. To these the blessed Helena said ‘Hear my words and take note of
my words with your ears. For you do not understand in the words of the
prophets how they prophesied about the coming of Christ.^ The reason that
I am interrogating you today, is that A boy shall be born to you and his
mother shall not know a man.^ And the writer’ David also knows the Lord,
saying I saw the Lord always before my face, because he is at my right hand
lest I be moved} And Isaiah says of you, / have begotten sons, but they have
reviled me. The ox knows his master and the ass his crib, but Israel does not
know me and my people have not understood me? And the whole of
scripture has spoken of this man; therefore you who used to know the law
are in error. Now, however, choose some who have diligently learned the
1 See Mark 7.33 and 15.19.
2 For the verb ‘hand over’ see Matt. 27.2, Rom. 4.25, 1 Pet. 2.23 etc. For resurrections by
Jesus see Matt. 9.25 par, Luke 7.14, John 11.43.
3 Cf. John 3.19, Col. 2.7, Heb. 10.1.
4 See Deut. 18.15, Ps. 95.11 etc.
5 A pervasive theme of early Christian literature, from Matt. 1.22 on. See further Skarsaune
(1987).
6 A variant of Isa. 7.14, stressing the virginity of Mary. Although the word almah in the
Hebrew text is now customarily rendered as ‘young woman’ rather than ‘virgin’, Kamesar
(1990) shows that the arguments advanced by ancient exegetes in favour of the latter are not
entirely nugatory.
7 That is, scriptural author.
8 Ps. 16.8 in the Vulgate (generally 17.8 in English renderings of the Hebrew), cited at Acts
2.25 by Peter. Whatever he understood it to mean, Athanasius (298-373) argued at Against the
Arians 1.61 that ‘the Lord’ is God and Christ himself the speaker, notwithstanding such famous
texts as Mark 14.62, Acts 7.56 and Rom. 8.34 where it is Christ who sits at the right hand of the
Father.
9 Isa. 1.2-3, cited against the Jews as early as the mid-second century: Justin Martyr,
1 Apology 63. The logic appears to be that as Israel clearly knows the Father, the God whom they
do not know is Christ.
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knowledge of the law, so that they may give an answer to my interrogations.’
And she commanded that they be kept in custody with the greatest care.
And taking counsel among themselves, they chose fifty men who were the
greatest experts in the law.* And coming to the queen they stood before her
face. She said ‘What are these?’, and they said, ‘These are the ones most
learned in the law’. And again the blessed Helena began to instruct them:
‘You who are truly foolish sons of Israel, who in accordance with the
scriptures have followed the blindness of your fathers, who say that Jesus is
not the Son of God, who read the law^ and understand not the prophets’.^
But they said, ‘We do indeed read and understand. But for what reason
do you say such things to us? Tell us, so that we may know and answer what
is being said.’ And she said to them again, ‘Come here and choose better
people’. And when they came, they said to one another, ‘For what reason do
you think the queen is imposing this labour upon us?’ And one of them,
Judas by name,"* said, ‘I know that she wants to put a question about the
wood on which our fathers hanged Jesus.^ Take care, therefore, that no-one
confesses to her; for then indeed our paternal traditions will be destroyed
and the law will be reduced to nothing. Zaccheus® declared this to my father,
1 ‘peritissimi’ is the word used by Paulinus of Nola, Letter 31.
2 A play on words (legitis legem), not pai'alleled here in the Greek; but a few words later the
Greek has an untranslatable play on anagignoskein (read) and gignoskein (know). The Latin
translator should be given credit for his success in reproducing the bad taste of the original.
3 Cf. Matt. 15.14, John 10.36 and 5.46, Luke 16.49, 2 Cor. 3.13-18.
4 For the earliest intimation of his presence in the legend, see Sozomen, Church History 2.1,
which denies that God could have chosen one of the impious race, as some believe, as his means
of revelation. Sozomen attests the other elements of the legend — the inscription, the
resurrection and the adornment of the reins - without, however, implying that all were included
in the legend of the Jew. The significance of the name Judas is clear enough, as it belonged not
only to the traitor Iscariot, but also to the eponymous ancestor of all Judaeans, if not strictly of
all Jews. Cf. Severus of Minorca at Bradbury (1996), 95, where the name of Reuben, the ‘first¬
born son of Jacob’, is given to the first Jew in Minorca to undergo spiritual rebirth.
5 Jesus is often said to have been hanged because Paul associates the Cross with the biblical
curse on ‘him that hangeth on a tree’ (Gal. 3.10; see also Acts 5.30). Justin, Trypho 86 contrasts
the tree of life with the wood of the Cross. The term ‘wood’ (as well as ‘Cross’) is used
repeatedly by Egeria, Pilgrimage 37 in her account of the public veneration of the relic.
6 The name of the redeemed tax collector at Luke 19.2, but Johanan ben Zakkhai (‘son of
Zacchaeus’) is also among the most famous rabbis of the first centuiy. Although he is said to
have lived into the reign of Trajan, he is also reported to have fled Jeiusalem after foreseeing the
destmction of the temple in 70 AD ; he resembled Christians also in attributing this calamity to
the unbelief of Israel, in teaching that the world would be reconciled through charity rather than
substitutionary offerings and in representing life as a choice between the paths to paradise and
Gehenna. See further Encyclopaedia Judiaca X, 248-54.
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and my father as he was dying communicated it to me, saying “Take care,
my son, when a question is put about the wood on which those who were
before us condemned the Messiah, reveal it before you suffer crucifixion.
Now the race of Hebrews has ceased to reign,^ and the kingdom belongs to
those who adore the crucified one. As for him, his reign is unto ages of ages,^
for he is Christ, the Son of the living God.”^
‘Then I said, “Eather, if then your fathers knew that this is the Christ,
why did they lay hands'* upon him?” And he said, “My son, you know his
ineffable name^ because I was never in their counsels and never joined with
them, but from time to time I spoke against them. [The fact is] that the elders
argued against me, and the priests therefore condemned him to be crucified,
imagining that they could put to death the immortal one who was buried
when they took him down from the Cross. He, however, rose from his burial
after three days, and revealed himself to his disciples. Hence also your
brother Stephen® believed and began to teach in his name. And, after taking
counsel, the Pharisees and Sadducees condemned him, and getting together
a crowd, stoned him to death.^ None the less, that blessed one, as he gave up
his soul, spread his hands and prayed to heaven, saying. Lord, do not requite
1 The ‘supersessionist’ doctrine, according to which the Church has unseated Israel in the
plan of God, was prevalent in the early Church, and foreshadowed by Matt. 8.12, Mai'k 12.9-10
and Heb. 3.11, 18 (citing Ps. 95.11).
2 Cf. Luke 1.33.
3 Matt. 16.16.
4 Mark 9.31.
5 Chi'ist has the ‘name above all names’ at Phil. 2.9 and Eph. 1.21. Jews held that the name
of God was too holy to be uttered (Mark 14.61-62 etc.), while the predicate ‘ineffable’ was
commonplace in Christian thought by the end of the second century (e.g. Clement, Stromateis
5.81).
6 It is not clear whether the meaning is that Stephen was a relative of Judas, or even that he
was a fellow Jew; neither assertion would be true to Acts 6.5, which makes it clear that Stephen
was a ‘Hellenist’ or Gentile Christian. It was, of course, impossible for the grandfather of Judas
to have been a contemporary of the events that he describes, so the legend of Judas must have
been contaminated at some stage with that of Protonike, wife of Claudius (41-54 AD). See also
my note on the Greek which introduces a distant familial relationship. It may be significant that
Stephen appears in the story of Judas Kyriakos; see also following note.
7 Acts 8.1. No relics of Stephen were known to the Church until 415, when a certain Lucian
claimed to have discovered them by revelation. For a summary of his account and of the
removal of the bones to Minorca see Bradbury (1996), 16-25. Van Esbroek(1984) suggests that
the Passion and Revelation of Stephen in which this miracle is recounted were composed at the
instance of Bishop John of Jerusalem, who is one of the principal figures in the narrative and
also promoted the veneration of the Cross.
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them for this sin. Listen to me, therefore, my son, and I shall teach you about
the holy Christ and his righteousness. [The fact is] that Saul, who sat before
the temple exercising the art of a tent-maker,' was a persecutor of those who
believed in Christ.^ It was he who roused the people against our brother
Stephen,^ but in his righteousness the Lord made him one of his own holy
disciples. This is the reason why I and my fathers have believed that he is
truly the Son of God.'' And now, my son, do not blaspheme him, nor those
who believe in him, and in this you shall possess eternal life.” This is the
witness of my father Simon. There, you have heard all; what do you wish to
do if she interrogates us about the wood of the Cross?’
The others said, however, ‘We have never heard such things as we have
heard today from you. If a question is put about this, take care that you do
not tell; after all, it is obvious from your saying this that you also know the
place.’ As they were saying this, soldiers came to them, saying, ‘Come, the
queen summons you’. Now when they had come before her they were put to
the test by her. And they did not wish to say anything true. Then the blessed
Helena ordered them all to be cast into the fire.^ In their fear, they handed
Judas over to her,® saying, ‘This man is the son of one who was upright and
a prophet, and he has the best and most exact’ learning in the law. This man,
mistress, will tell you faithfully all that your heart desires.’® And as they all
1 Holder’s text reads scaenografiam, which ought to signify ‘scene-painting’, but Paul’s
profession is known from Acts 18.3, and the variants collected by Borgehammar (1991), 238
imply that the original term was intended to represent the Greek skenoraphos. This is one of a
number of passages which Borgehammar cites as proof that the Latin is indebted to the Greek
and not the Syriac, but he also admits that skenoraphos is only one of three variants in the Greek
manuscripts. The Greek of Acts 18.3 is skenopoios, which received the caique scenofactorius in
the Vulgate.
2 Gal. 1.23, 1 Tim. 1.13.
3 A cruel inference from Acts 7.58, 8.1 and 9.1.
4 Perhaps alluding to Matt. 27.54, and also to Paul’s confession of Christ as Son of God at
Gal. 1.16.
5 The Jews of the Christian era do not display the fortitude of their countrymen, the ‘three
children’, who were cast into the furnace by Nebuchadnezzar for their refusal to worship his
statue in Daniel 3. In chapter 1 of this text the children were also proof against hunger, whereas
Judas is soon to yield after seven days of enforced starvation
6 As the Jews had handed over Jesus to a pagan suzerain: Matt. 27.2, Rom. 4.25 etc.
7 If with Holder’s apparatus on p. 21 we read here cum acribia, we must agree with
Borgehammar (1991), 238 that it is a borrowing from the Greek original, where akribos
(‘exactly, accurately’) is the term used.
8 See my note to the Greek text on this echo of Ps. 37.4.
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gave the same testimony,' she dismissed them and detained Judas alone.
Thereupon the queen called him to her and said to him, ‘Life and death are
set before you; choose for yourself which you prefer, life or death’ ? Judas
said, ‘And who, placed in the wilderness with bread close by, will eat
stones?’^ The blessed Helena said, ‘If you wish to live in heaven and on
earth,'' tell me where the precious wood^ of the Cross is hidden’.
Judas said, ‘As to the truth about matters that were two hundred years
more or less® before our time, how can we, latecomers as we are, know this?’
The blessed Helena said, ‘In the same way as we know that before the
present generation a war took place in Ilium^ and the Troad,® and all now
remember the dead, and there is a written tradition about the monuments and
places’. And Judas said, ‘Of course, mistress, seeing that they have been
written down’The blessed Helena said, ‘And a certain man has confessed
a short while ago the things that you have done’. And Judas said, ‘I have the
blessed witness of the gospels to the place of his crucifixion’. {The blessed
Helena said} ‘Just show me the place that is called Calvary,'® and I shall
1 The syntax is confused, but if the original was omnium simul testimonium perhibentium
(cf. Holder’s edition p. 21), then we have here a genitive absolute, which, as Borgehammar
(1991), 238 contends, betokens a Greek original.
2 As Joshua set them before the Jews at Deut. 31.15. On the persistent theme of the ‘two
ways’ in Christian literature see Aldridge (1999).
3 This utterance, apparently proverbial, may already have been known to the author of Matt.
4.3—4, where Christ is incited to turn stones into bread. Cf. also Luke 11.11.
4 She appears to insinuate that he will otherwise be guilty of the sin against the Holy Spirit,
which cannot be forgiven in this world or the one to come: Matt. 12.32.
5 These words do not occur in the Greek, and indeed the Latin generally uses lignum, as the
Greek employs xulon, as a synonym for the Cross.
6 Three centuries having now elapsed since the passion, this phrase ought to be taken as a
reference to the burial of the Cross in the time of Trajan.
7 Another name for Troy, but the Syriac appears to speak instead of the tomb of Ilus, founder
of Troy, whose tomb is mentioned at Iliad 11.371-72 etc. See Drijvers and Drijvers (1997), 62n.
8 The Trojan war, described in Homer’s Iliad, was a touchstone of antiquity in Greece,
although the Jews (and Christian readers of the Old Testament) were fond of pointing out that
the works of Moses were more ancient. Both Strabo (13.1.34) and Pliny the Elder {Natural
History 16.238) professed to know the site of Troy, though modem archaeology has not entirely
vindicated either: see Cook (1973), 94-113, esp. 111.
9 The author may be reminding us that the Jews retained no memorials of their prophets,
except perhaps those of some that they had killed (Deut. 34.6; cf. Matt. 23.39).
10 Luke 23.33. This Latin name, derived from the word for ‘bald’, translates the Hebrew
Golgotha, ‘place of the skull’ (Matt. 27.33). According to Drijvers and Drijvers (1997), 64n, the
Syriac reads simply ‘skull’, and therefore it is derived not from the Latin but from the Syriac
version of the New Testament.
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cause the place to be cleansed in case by any chance I may find my desire’.
Judas said, T do not know the place as I have never been there’. The blessed
Helena said, ‘Nevertheless, by the Crucified One,^ I shall have you put to if
you do not tell me the truth’. And she ordered him to be thrust into a dry
well^ and remain there without food for seven days.
But when seven days had passed, Judas cried out from the well, saying,
‘I beseech you, pull me out and I shall show you the Cross of Christ. When,
however, he had come up from the pit and did not know for certain the place
where the Cross lay, he lifted his voice to the Lord in Hebrew:^
Aisaarabrimilas/filomabon.achuiroiloemlemetdochzod/
failemfaudiubariccataadonaheluielecanro/
abraxioetadalbarucadtamdextrambuzima/
tuccatadavidauiatherahelbememonsegen/
geminiihm.^*
The meaning of this is:
God, God, who madest heaven and earth,^ who in thy palm hast laid out the
heaven and with thy fist hast measured the earth,® who sittest above the
chariot of the Cherubim,’ and these fly in the courses of the air, in the
1 I take this to be the sense of per crucifixum, though the Greek does not contain an oath, and
threatens starvation.
2 The Latin is lacus, which ought to mean Take’, but is best construed as an equivalent for
the word lakkos (‘pit’ or ‘ditch’) in the Greek original. Cf. the Latin translation of Jer. 2.13.
3 As Rendel Harris (1894) and Staubinger (1912), 59-60 point out, this prayer (which is not
represented in the Syriac narratives, though a version of it occurs in the Kyriakos legend) is
gibberish of a kind well known from the Nag Hammadi Codices and the magical papyri. Unlike
the latter, however, it never invokes the names of lao and Adonai, and Borgehammar (1991),
171 suggests that its structure is based on those in 2 Kgs 19.15-19, Isa. 37.16-20 and Esth.
13.9-17. The last may be of particular importance if I am right to associate the conclusion with
the end of the book of Esther and the aetiology of the feast of Purim. In the Revelation of
Stephen the position of the martyr’s bones is revealed by an inscription which purportedly
contains four Hebrew names: see Bradbury (1996), 19.
4 Variants are recorded by Borgehammar (1991), 272-78 and Holder, p. 23 with some
pertinent observations on the use of specious Hebrew in magical practice. See Preisendanz,
PMG 13.63 for a prayer to the creator, which attributes to him the regulation of the sun and
moon. To judge by Philo, On the Cherubim 21-25, cherubs could be taken as personifications
of the great cosmic cycles.
5 A commonplace since Gen. 1.1, but also the foundation of Christian confidence at Acts
4.24.
6 Isa. 40.12.
7 2Chron. 3.10, Ps. 80.1.
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immeasurable light’ to which human measure cannot extend, for it is thou
who hast made these six creatures with their sixfold wings for thy service;
and four^ of these who fly and serve thee, singing with unceasing voice.
Holy, holy, holy are called the Cherubim,^ while thou hast placed two of
them in paradise to guard the tree of life, and these are called'’ Seraphim.^
Thou, however, dost hold dominion over them, thou who didst consign the
unbelieving angels to the depths of Tartarus,^ and now they are beneath the
bottom of the abyss,^ to be tortured by the breath of serpents,^ and they
cannot speak against thee. And now God, if it is thy will that the son of Mary
should reign - and had he not been from thee he could not have done such
works of power, and had he not indeed been thy Son thou wouldst not have
raised him again from the dead - give us therefore, God, a miracle, such as
when thou didst hear thy servant Moses and didst show to him the bones of
our father Joseph.^ And so. Lord, if it be thy pleasure to show us the secret
1 1 Tim. 6.16.
2 As at Ezek. 1.6, where, however, they have four wings. Their song, already known to
Ephraem, Epiphany Hymn 2.5, is recorded at length in Zohar 231a-b, cited by Lachower and
Tishby (1989), 636-37. Knowledge of the nomenclature of angels is a precondition of
efficacious magic in both Jewish and Gnostic literature: Schiirer (1986), 347^9; Robinson
(1988), 2.5.105.
3 The chant ‘holy, holy, holy’ (the Trisagion) is in fact ascribed to a retinue of Seraphs at Isa.
6.2-3, but the author perhaps confounds them with the Cherubim because elsewhere the latter
are the only angelic beings who support the throne of God. Isaiah’s Seraphs have six wings, as
do the beasts who intone the Trisagion at Rev. 4.6-8, but the faces of the latter resemble those
of the Cherubim in Ezek. 1.4-14. One aim of this prayer may therefore be to vindicate the
superiority of the Christian prophet. See further my note on the Greek.
4 A singular verb in Latin, though following the word duo (‘two’), the word animalia being
understood. Borgehammar (1991), 238 notes that the neuter plural takes a singular verb in
Greek, though not in Latin, and infers that the solecism here is occasioned by adherence to the
Greek original.
5 At Gen. 3.24 they are Cherubim. Since, however, Seraphim were serpentine in form, they
might be thought better suited than the Cherubim to the task of excluding human beings from
paradise - all the more so if Satan himself is taken to have been a Seraph, as cabbalists have
asserted, notwithstanding Ezek. 28.14: see Horowitz (1996), 222. Ephraem, Paradise Hymn
3.15 places Seraphs in Eden, and at 14.16 it is they, not the Cherubs, who inhabit heaven.
6 See my notes on the Greek text for parallels to this name.
7 Cf. Preisendanz (1973-74), 4.1249 for a prayer to Christ consigning a demon to the abyss
of chaos. Elsewhere in the same papyrus, other deities are evoked from Tartarus, where they
seem to govern rather than suffer: 4.1370, 104, 1451, 2337, 2537.
8 Reading cruciandi with Holder’s apparatus, p. 24. The Greek has a different reading, but
this one seems to combine a reminiscence of the ‘worm that dieth not’ (Isa. 66.24, Mark 9.44)
with a reminiscence of the desolation of Jerusalem (Isa. 35.7, Jer. 9.11).
9 Ginzberg (1920), 181-83 records a legend that the bones of Joseph were sealed in a leaden
coffin and submerged in the river Nile. Having located the coffin with the help of Serah,
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treasury, cause to ascend from that same place the smoke of the aromatic
odour of sweetness,* that I may believe in the crucified Christ, that he is the
king of Israel now and unto ages of ages?
As soon as Judas had intoned this prayer the place trembled and a mass
of aromatic smoke, the odour of sweetness, ascended from the place, so that
Judas in wonder clapped both his hands, and said, ‘In truth thou, Christ, art
saviour of the world. I give thee thanks, Lord, because, unworthy as I am,
thou hast not deprived^ me of thy grace. {1} Pray then, Lord, that thou
mayest be mindful'* of my sins, and mayest number me with my brother
Stephen, who is enrolled among thy twelve apostles.’® And, having said this,
he girded himself and, taking a spade, began to dig. And when he had dug
twenty fathoms,® he found three crosses hidden. And the blessed Helena
demanded of him which was the Cross of Christ, ‘for we know that there are
daughter of Asher, Moses divided Joseph’s cup into quarters and cast these one by one into the
river. The pieces bearing images of a lion, an ox and an eagle were ineffective, but the one that
bore the likeness of a man brought up the coffin to the surface, and it was then carried in the
wilderness as a shrine by the Israelites. See the Greek for a reading that commemorates the
immersion of the body.
1 Conventional imagery of sacrifice, with a probable reminiscence of Eph. 5.2, where Christ
himself is said to be a sweet savour. A similar fragrance is said to have accompanied the
exhumation of Stephen: Bradbury (1996), 19. It may not be out of place to note that the Cross
is said to exhale an odour in Gregory of Elvira, Sofig of Songs 3.1 (fourth century), and that
signing with the Cross accompanied chrism, the pouring of the oil, in the rite of baptism as
prescribed e.g. by Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition 22.
2 Luke 1.32-33.
3 This word in the Latin is followed by a genitive, not the usual ablative - another vestige for
Borgehammar (1991), 238 of a Greek original. In fact, however, there are cases in Latin of the
fifth century when the genitive displaces the ablative without Greek precedent. See e.g.
Augustine, On the Work of Monks 9.10, where the vetus latina (pre-Vulgate) rendering of 1 Cor.
9.15 contains the phrase as nullius usus sum (T used none’). This is not a slavish rendering of
the Greek, which has the regular dative, and the Vulgate employed the ablative demanded by
classical usage.
4 No doubt the better reading is ‘unmindful’, which is suggested by the Greek and occurs in
Holder’s apparatus, p. 24.
5 Meaning perhaps that he was ranked with them, as Constantine is emblematically at
Eusebius, Constantine 4.60.3. The author may have forgotten that Stephen was not a Jew, but
surely he must have been aware that he had not been one of the first apostles. The Greek at this
point styles Stephen the Protomartyr and affirms that he and the speaker are of the same genos
(race or family).
6 This being the depth at which the Cross had been buried in Trajan’s time: Drijvers and
Drijvers (1997), 66.
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two others, robbers, who were crucified with him’.' And they carried it into
the midst of the city, waiting for Christ to show his glory. And about the
ninth hour^ a certain young man was brought dead on a bed. But Judas, full
of joy, said, ‘Now you will know, mistress, which is the much-desired wood,
and its truth’ And taking hold of the bed, Judas caused the dead man to be
put down, and put upon him particular crosses, and the dead man did not
rise. But when he placed the third Cross, that of the Lord, upon the dead
man, straightway the youth who had been dead got up; and all who were
present glorified the Lord.
But the devil, always jealous of all things good, flew through the air''
with furious cries, saying, ‘Who is it this time who does not permit me to
take their souls, Jesus of Nazareth?^ Have you not drawn all to you and
revealed your Cross against my people? Judas, why have you done this? Was
it not through a Judas that I first produced betrayal,® and see, now it is
through a Judas that I am expelled. Eor my part, I have discovered what to do
against you; I shall raise up another king who will forsake the Crucified and
follow my counsels, adding wrongful torments, and now you will deny the
Crucified.’^ But Judas, brimming with the Holy Spirit,® said, ‘And Christ
1 See Matt. 27.38 par. Ambrose, Death of Theodosius 46 asserts that, though three crosses
were discovered, that of Christ was instantly recognized by its inscription, ‘Jesus of Nazareth,
King of the Jews’, in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. In Rufinus, Church History 10.7, Socrates,
Church History 1.7 and Sozomen, Church History 2.1, the wood that bears the rubric has
become detached, and in Paulinus, Letter 31, no trace of it remains. Although the present author
says nothing of it, the mbric was preserved in the time of Egeria: Pilgrimage 36.
2 This being the hour at which Christ himself expired: Matt. 27.46.
3 Rufinus, Church History 10.7 gives a longer speech to Helena’s mentor (in this case
Bishop Macarius), and has him work the miracle on a moribund female rather than a dead
youth. Borgehammar (1991), 54 believes that this was also the test related by Gelasius, while
Drijvers and Drijvers (1997), 66n observes that in the Protonike legend, the power of the Cross
is exhibited in the resurrection of the empress’s daughter. Paulinus of Nola, Letter 31 relates
that the corpse of a man was brought to Helena at her own behest as a means of ascertaining the
identity of the True Cross.
4 On the devil as prince of the air cf. Eph. 6.12, and on his persecution of the elect see 1 Pet.
5.8. To this cry we may compare that of Apollo leaving Delphi at PmdQntius, Apotheosis 412, or
that of God himself in the (fourth-century) Handing Over of Pilate at Elliott (1993), 210-11.
5 Cf. the exclamation of the demon at Mark 1.24.
6 John 13.27. The Greek adds the word ‘traitor' to the name of Judas.
7 A reference to Julian, ‘the Apostate’, whose repeal of Christian privileges was represented
as a persecution, and gave rise to many accounts of martyrdom, most of which, including that of
Cyriacus, are likely to be fictitious. See Luigi (1904) and (1906).
8 As is said of his ‘brother’ Stephen in the hour of martyrdom: Acts 7.55.
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who has raised the dead' condemns you to the abyss of eternal fire’.^ The
blessed Helena heard this, and wondered at his faith. With great zeal she
encased the precious Cross in gold and precious stones. She had a silver
chest made^ and in it she encased the Cross of Christ, and she erected a
church in the actual place of Calvary.^
Judas received the baptism of incorruption^ in Christ Jesus. As they
prayed a faithful flame was shown to them. She commended him to the
bishop who was then in place, and he baptized him in Christ Jesus.® But
while the blessed Helena was still preaching in Jerusalem, it came to pass
that the blessed bishop received the sleep in the Spirit.’ The blessed Helena
summoned to her presence Eusebius, bishop of Rome, and he ordained
Judas bishop over the church of Christ in Jerusalem.^ He changed his name,
however, and he was called Cyriacus.® Now the blessed Helena was full of
faith in God, and understood in scripture both the Old Testament and the
New; filled with the teaching of the Holy Spirit, she began once more to look
earnestly for the nails that had been fixed in the Cross, whereby the
unrighteous Jews had crucified the Saviour. And calling to her Judas, who
1 The construction qui mortuos suscitavit Christus is sufficiently unusual to warrant the
verdict of Borgehammar (1991), 238 that it bespeaks a Greek original.
2 Cf. Matt. 25.41and Rev. 21.8. The Greek speaks more precisely of the ‘lowest abyss’.
3 In imitation perhaps of the ark of God in which the scrolls of the Law were housed at
Exod. 25.10-16 etc. Egeria, Pilgrimage 36-37 records that the contents of this were taken out
and exhibited on Good Friday in Jerusalem. After it had received the adoration of the people,
the Cross was carried along the way of sorrows at the head of the congregation.
4 Both events are briefly recorded by Rufinus, Church History 10.8 and Socrates, Church
History 1.17. Paulinus, Letter 31 furnishes the most opulent description of the church: ‘Brilliant
with gilded webs and rich with golden altars, it preserves the Cross stored in a sacred chest.’ He
adds that the bishop of the city exhibited the Cross every year ‘while the passover of the Lord
was being celebrated’, but not on any other day except at the request of ardent pilgrims. On the
archaeology of the church in Jerusalem and related monuments much has been written, most
recently by Cameron and Hall (1999), 273-94.
5 This phrase, which couples Acts 13.34 with 1 Cor. 15.53, is first attested in the Acts of
Thomas, a writing often supposed to be of Syrian provenance. The Greek has ‘baptism of
regeneration’, echoing Tit. 3.5.
6 See above on the baptism of Constantine. It is possible to argue that Matt. 28.19 is
enjoining baptism in the Trinity for the nations, whereas Acts 2.38 implies that Jews, who know
God already but not Jesus, need only to confess the single name.
7 Cf. the phrase ‘sleep in Jesus’ at 1 Thess. 4.14; also John 11.11 on Lazarus.
8 The Syriac version states that the original bishop, Macarius, had died, but that good man
is entirely absent from the present narrative.
9 Derived from kurios, ‘Lord’. Rev. 2.17, which says that every saint possesses a new name,
may have given rise to the custom of adopting a new name on baptism.
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was also called Cyriacus,* she said to him, ‘Although the desire that I had
with regard to the wood of the Cross has been fulfilled, yet sadness hangs
over me on account of the fastenings that were fixed in it. No indeed, I shall
have no peace in this matter until the Lord has fulfilled my desire. Come
here now, and pray to the Lord about this.’^
The holy bishop Cyriacus, coming to the place of Calvary along with
many brothers who had believed in Jesus Christ on account of the finding of
the Sacred Cross and because of the sign that was worked in the dead man,^
lifted his eyes to heaven and at the same time beating his breast with his
hands, cried out from the fulness of his heart to the Lord, confessing the
ignorance of former times and blessing all those who had believed in Christ
and those who were still going to believe. Now when he had prayed for a
long time that a sign would be revealed to him concerning the fastenings in
the same way as with regard to the Cross, at the end of the prayer where the
Amen belongs, such a sign occurred that all of us who were present saw it. A
brilliant light shone forth from the place where the Holy Cross was found,
brighter than the radiance of the sun, and all at once those nails which had
been fixed in the Lord’s body'* appeared like gold glowing in the earth, so
that all, believing with no doubts, said ‘We know now in whom we have
believed’ Receiving two with great awe, he presented them to the blessed
Helena, who, falling on her knees and bowing her head, did reverence to
them.
Tilled as she was with wisdom and knowledge, she wondered long and
hard what she ought to do about them.® When she had bound herself to
search out every avenue of truth, the grace of the Holy Spirit came into her
senses,’ to tell her to make from them at that place a memorial for the
1 Cf. Acts 13.9 on Saul ‘who is also called Paul’. Having persecuted the Christians as his
predecessor persecuted David, the second Saul had also assumed a less ill-omened name.
2 It is Helena, under the guidance of the Spirit, who discovers the nails in Ambrose, Death
of Theodosius, 46—47.
3 Miraculous signs evoked belief, according to John 7.31, although the demand for signs is
mocked at 4.48.
4 Borgehammar (1991), 238 suggests that the Latin construction, qui in cruce confixi
fuerant, is a caique upon the Greek of the original.
5 Cf. 2 Tim. 1.12, where Paul speaks of his own belief.
6 Ambrose, Death of Theodosius 46 writes ‘she knew not what to do’ before the discovery
of the nails.
7 See Ambrose, Death of Theodosius 46 and Paulinus, Letter 31 for prototypes of this
eulogy, though only the former goes on to record this anecdote. Socrates, Church History 1.17
is the first to use the term ‘memorial’.
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THE COMING OF THE HOLY CROSS
79
generation whose coming the prophets had prophesied many generations
before. And calling to her a man of great faith and learning, to whom many
gave testimonials, she said to him, ‘Obey the King’s command and perform
a royal duty. Take the nails and make from them bits in the rein of a horse
that belongs to the King.' They will be an invincible weapon against all his
adversaries. There will be victory for the King and peace from war.’ This was
so that what was said by the prophet might be fulfilled.- And it will be in that
day that what is in the rein of a horse will be called holy to the Lord?
As for the blessed Helena, who had confirmed her faith in Jerusalem and
completed the whole task, she launched a persecution^ against the Jews who
had not believed, and drove them with threats from Judaea.'' And such was
the grace that attended the holy Bishop Cyriacus that demons were put to
flight by his prayer^ and he healed the infirmities of everyone.® And the
blessed Helena, bequeathing many funds to the holy Bishop Cyriacus for the
relief of the poor, she slept in peace sixteen days before the Kalends of May,^
1 Ambrose, Death of Theodosius 48 and Rufinus, Church History 10.8 report this
appropriation of the nails, but do not cite Zechariah or imply that they had any other than a
cosmetic function. Borgehammar (1991), 55 reckons both the action and the prophecy among
the details likely to been contained already in the naiTative of Gelasius.
2 Zech. 14.20. The first nan'ative of the miracle to cite this verse is Sozomen, Church
History 2.1; Cyril of Alexandria, however, had alluded to the legend in his Commentary on
Zechariah 94, while Jerome, in his comment on the same verse, mocks the simplicity of those
who would apply it to this event. On the transmission and significance of this prophecy in
accounts of the discovery, see Drijvers (1992), 109—13.
3 The Jews suffer from Christians what the latter suffered from both Jews and Gentiles; but
the Jews succumb where the Christians survived.
4 Thus repeating the work of Hadrian after Bar-Kokhba’s rebellion in 135, and perhaps also
imitating the Jews’ revenge upon their persecutors in Esther 9, an event commemorated by a
festival on the 14th of the month Adar. According to Socrates, Church History 7.16, the Jews
were wont to re-enact the execution of Hamann at this festival (Esth. 9.25) in open mockery of
the Crucifixion. Drijvers and Drijvers (1997), 71n observes that the Protonike nan'ative ends
with the expulsion of the Jews from Rome by Claudius.
5 Exorcism, or the expulsion of demons from a human body, is regai'ded by almost all our
ancient witnesses as a practice confined to Christians and Palestinian Jews: see Acts 16.20 and
19.13-16; Josephus, Antiquities 8.2.4; Lucian, Lover of Lies 12; Minucius Felix, Octavius 27;
Preisendanz (1973-74), 4.1227; Origen, Against Celsus 5.45; Athanasius, On the Incarnation
30.6. Too many scholars have cited Philostratus, Life of Apollonius 3.38 and 4.20 as though
these singulai' passages were proof of a widespread custom in the Hellenistic world.
6 Such miracles were attributed to the apostles by their admirers (Acts 3.1 etc.), and even
perhaps by Paul to himself (Rom. 15.19).
7 That is on 16 April by inclusive counting. Cf. Bradbury (1996), 121 and 130 on the equally
illusory precision of Severus of Minorca.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
requesting all men who love Christ, along with their wives, to keep a festival
in remembrance of the day on which the Holy Cross was found, the fifth day
after the Nones of May.' And may all those who keep the Cross in
remembrance receive a portion with holy Mary the mother of the Lord.^
HERE ENDS THE FINDING^ OF THE HOLY CROSS.
1 That is, by inclusive counting, on 11 May, though it may be that post here is a mistake for
ante, since the usual date for the celebration of the discovery in the west was 3 May (i.e. five
days by inclusive counting before the seventh). Neither date falls within Eastertide, which never
fell later than 21 April in the Roman world. Paulinus, Letter 31 appears to say, by contrast, that
Easter was the only season at which the Cross was commonly on display. Egeria, Pilgrimage 37
confirms that the occasion was Good Friday. Nevertheless, the feast of the elevation of the
Cross was 14 September, according to the Greek and to Borgehammar (1991), 96-104. The
Syriac does not specify a date.
2 The title ‘Mother of God’ is already bestowed by Constantine on Mary at Oration 11, and
may translate the formula dei genetrix which occurs in the present passage. Wright (1991)
observes that a variety of Latin titles continued to be current in Latin authors after Constantine.
3 The title of the original rather than the composite narrative; see n. 1 above.
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STORY OF THE DISCOVERY OF THE HONOURABLE
AND LIFE-GIVING' CROSS
The three hundred and third year since Our Lord’s Passion^ was being
accomplished, when the seeking and discovery of the life-giving Cross took
place. The ruler at that time was Constantine, that man most beloved of
God,^ whose mother was Helena, the right worshipful lover of Christ.^
Having made a diligent study of the incarnation^ of Our Lord Jesus Christ
and his elevation on the Cross® and his resurrection from the dead, and
possessed as she was of great intellect, she strove with zeal and faith to seek
out the august and precious Cross of Christ and to show this to the world.
And she journeyed to Jerusalem on the twenty-eighth day of the second
month^ with a host of soldiers. And having convened an assembly,* she
called together the Jews who were in Jerusalem and those who were in the
neighbouring cities and villages. And the total number of Jews who were
gathered was found to be two thousand,® and when she had summoned them,
1 Both these epithets are explained in the text below.
2 Reckoning from the fifteenth year of Tiberius in 29/30 (Luke 3.1), this brings us to 331/2.
3 The adjective theophilos (of which the superlative theophilestatos occurs here) can mean
‘loving God’ (Clement of Alexandria, Rich Man’s Salvation 34), but when accompanied by
explicit reference to a person’s secular or sacred office, almost always means ‘loved by God’
(see e.g. Athanasius, Apo/ogy to Constantins 1). Cameron and Hall (1999), 138-39 believe that
Eusebius applies it to both Helena and Constantine in the former sense at Constantine 3.43.4,
and in the latter at Constantine 3.47.1.
4 The Greek word is philochristos. When applied by Eusebius to Constantine’s father in the
titular inscriptions to Constantine, p.3.25 Winkelmann, the epithet philochristos indicates a
sympathetic disposition to Christianity, rather than formal adherence. Christophilos may bear
the same sense in chapter 7 of the Byzantine life of Constantine at Lieu and MontseiTat (1996),
113. Both compounds seem to be most frequently epithets of the laity (cf. Mark the Deacon,
Life of Porphyry 69, 70, 76, 84, 93. 103).
5 Enanthropesis (literally, becoming man, rather than becoming flesh as John 1.14 and the
Latin incamatio suggest) was a technical term in Greek since the early third century:
Hippolytus, Commentary on Daniel 4.49.1. See note to the Latin text on the rendering of it.
6 Cf. John 3.19 and 12.31.
7 That is 28 February, so the year is 302.
8 Using the term ekklesia in its classical and secular meaning, rather than in the sense of
‘Church’, which was now more usual.
9 Three thousand in the Latin, on which see my note.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
the blessed Helena spoke as follows: T have learned from the divine and
holy scriptures that you were a righteous seed beloved of God,* yet you did
not understand, but, deeming light to be darkness and truth to be a lie,
poured curses on the God who wished to redeem you from the ancient curse,
you chose to reckon among the dead the one who raised the dead and the one
who brought you light with his spittle you spat on with unclean spitting.^
Now, however, I say to you, choose for yourselves those whom you consider
precisely learned in the Law, so that perhaps you may answer me about the
matter on which I am about to interrogate you.’
Now they came in great fear, and after examining themselves, they found
that those who reckoned themselves learned in the law were a thousand
men;^ in a body they came before the blessed Helena, testifying about the
thousand men, that ‘these are the ones who are well and precisely learned in
the law’. Eor her part, she repeated what she had said and after much study'*
said, ‘Hear what I say and pay heed to the words of my mouth.^ You have not
heard the holy scriptures, how the prophets made predictions about Our
Saviour Jesus Christ, because the Holy Spirit was speaking through the
prophets. A boy has been bom to us and his mother shall not know a man.^
And again the hymn-writer David [says] I saw the Lord always before my
face, because he is at my right hand lest I stumbled And Isaiah declared of
you, I have begotten sons, but they have set me at nought. And again he says
The ox knows his master and the ass his crib, but Israel does not know me
and my people have not understood mef See then, you who con the law, you
do not know it, and hence I command that you be detained by the soldiers,
and that after discussion you choose for yourselves those who reckon to be
precisely learned in the law.’
1 This phrase could be constructed from Wis. 10.16, Ecclus. 47.22, Isa. 44.2 and 61.9 in the
Septuagint, though the closest parallel is perhaps at Testament of Levi 2.
2 See Latin version for biblical references. Such antitheses would have been familiar to the
author and his readers from paschal liturgies: cf. Melito of Sardis, On the Pasch p. 12.10-14.
3 A surprisingly high proportion (50%) of the total of 2000. The Latin text estimated the
total at 3000, which yields a slightly more plausible fraction.
4 A longer clause than in the Latin version.
5 The first part of the sentence is commonplace, the second alludes to Ps. 53.2 in the
Septuagint.
6 Isa. 9.6, but with an added reference to the virgin birth which is not found in the Septuagint
or in any other witness known to me.
7 See note to this citation of Ps. 16.8 in the Latin.
8 Isa. 1.2-3.
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THE DISCOVERY OF THE CROSS
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Soon they went away again and holding a council among themselves,*
they chose fifty men who were precisely learned in the law. And when they
came to the queen she said ‘Who are these?’, and they said, ‘These are the
ones who are precisely acquainted with the law’. And beginning again the
blessed Helena taught them the lore of truth, saying ‘How long have you,
foolish Israel, not been content with your ancient error and the blindness of
your fathers, saying that Jesus is not the Son of God while you have the
prophets in your possession and con them yet have no knowledge of the
law?’^ But they said, ‘We do indeed con^ and know, and we understand the
law well. But tell us, mistress, the purpose of your interrogation, so that
knowing it we may give an answer to the things you say. ’ And she replied to
them, ‘Go away on your own again, and choose for yourselves with great
precision those who are credited with learning in the law, and consider the
more precise inquiries I shall put to you.’
And when they came, they said to one another, ‘For what reason do you
think the queen is visiting these labours and interrogations on us?’ And one
of them, Judas by name,'* answered them, ‘I know that she wants to make an
inquiry about the wood^ on which our fathers® hanged the Messiah. Take
care, therefore, that no-one confesses to her; for then indeed our paternal
traditions will be absolutely destroyed. For Zaccheus my grandfather as he
was dying enjoined this on my father, and my father as he was dying
enjoined it on me, saying “Know, my son, that an inquiry is to take place
about the wood on which the Messiah was hanged. When, therefore, the
1 When used of Jewish gatherings, the word sumboulion has the connotation of conspiracy,
e.g. at Mark 15.1.
2 See the Latin for the biblical allusions here.
3 Playing on anagigndskein (to read) and gigndskein (to know), perhaps with an
unconscious reminiscence of the contrast between reading and understanding drawn by Paul at
2 Cor. 3.14-15.
4 See my note to the Latin for the obvious significance of the name. Borgehammar (1991),
174-75 proposes that the author may have been acquainted with the traditions now preserved in
the Aramaic targums or paraphrases of the Hebrew. Targum Onkelos construes Gen. 49.8 as
though it had glossed the name of Judas as ‘you will confess and not be ashamed’; Targum
Neofiti states that ‘all Jews shall be named after him’; Targum Pseudo-Jonathan combines these
interpretations.
5 The word xulon (wood) often functions in biblical Greek as a synonym for tree, e.g. in the
curse on the hanged malefactor at Deut. 21.22-23. Our author observes the apostolic practice of
styling the Cross a xulon in its patibulary function (Acts 13.29; cf. Gal. 3.13), and a stauros
when considered as an instrument of faith (1 Cor. 1.18).
6 The speaker may be attempting to reduce the culpability of the murderers by applying to
them a phrase more properly used of the patriarchs, e.g. at John 6.31 and 1 Cor. 10.1.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
quest for the Cross is about to commence, reveal it quickly before you suffer
painful retribution. Eor no longer does the race of Hebrews reign,' but the
kingdom and the glory will be of those who adore the crucified one, for he
will reign for ages of ages.”
‘And I said to him, “Eather, if you knew that this Jesus was the Christ,
why did our fathers lay hands upon him?” And he said to me, “Listen, son.
His stainless name^ is aware that I never sat in counsel with those who
reviled him, but even spoke against those who disbelieved in him. For that
matter, neither did our fathers^ join the conspiracy, nor did they concur'' with
those who crucified Jesus, but when he denounced the elders and the chief
priests,^ they condemned him, imagining that it was in their power to put
him to death, while in fact they put him to death in his manhood, but he
himself, being true God, remained impassible and immortal. And when they
took him down from the Cross, they placed him in a tomb, setting over him
also soldiers as guards, and rising within three days he revealed himself to
his disciples. Hence also Stephen, the brother of my grandfather’s father,®
believed and began to teach the people the facts about Jesus. And, after
convening a council,’ the Sadducees with the Pharisees condemned him, and
brought the whole of the multitude together, and they stoned him to death.
None the less, that blessed one, as on the point of giving up his soul,
spreading his hands to heaven, said. Lord, do not lay this sin to their charge.
Listen, therefore, my son, so that I may teach you about the holy Christ and
his goodness. [I tell you] that Saul too, who sat by the temple and was also a
1 The Jews have lost their character as a royal priesthood (Exod. 19.6) and will not be the
beneficiaries of the promises at Dan. 2.44 and 7.27.
2 A hyperbolic instance of the notorious reluctance of the Jews to allude to God directly: cf.
Deut. 12.21. The word akhrantos (‘stainless’) is used at Exod. 17.6 and Lam. 4.7 in non-
Septuagintal versions, but not applied to the name of God in these passages or in other texts
known to me. On the exalted name of Jesus see Phil. 2.9-10.
3 In the Latin only the first person is used, and the confusion of the Greek MSS at this point
suggests to Borgehammar (1991), 252 that the Latin has preseiwed the original sense. In view of
what is later said about Stephen, a redactor may be attempting to purge the impossible sugges¬
tion that the grandfather of Judas was a contemporary of Stephen, but his previous words ‘I
never sat in counsel’ reveal that this was indeed his original claim.
4 The word used of Paul when he consents to Stephen’s death at Acts 7.60.
5 These are the ones who try Jesus at Matt. 27.1 and Luke 22.36.
6 Stephen is now alleged to have lived two generations eaiJier than the grandfather of Judas;
the interval is still impossibly short. See my introduction on the chronology, where I assume,
with Borgehammar, that the Latin is truer to the primitive version.
7 Cf. Acts 6.12 for the term sunedrion, which may denote the sanhedrin (ruling body of the
Jews in major cities) or a more informal gathering.
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THE DISCOVERY OF THE CROSS
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tentrope-maker/ was himself a persecutor of those who did not put their
faith in the law. And he it was who roused the people against our father
Stephen,^ and was consenting to his death; but taking compassion on him,
the Lord made him also one of his own illustrious disciples. This is the
reason why I and my fathers have believed that he is truly the Son of God.^
And you therefore, son, do not blaspheme against him, nor those who hope
in him, and you shall possess eternal life.”
‘This, friends, is what my father Simon‘S enjoined on me when he was
about to die. There, you have heard all; what do you wish to do about this? If
the queen interrogates us about the Cross, what shall we say to her?’ And in
answer they said, ‘We have never heard such things as we have heard today
from you. But if an inquiry takes place about this, no-one is to confess.’ As
they were saying this, soldiers came to them, saying, ‘Come, the queen
summons you’. Now when they had come before her they gave her many
answers, but did not speak the truth. Finally the queen, moved by the Holy
Spirit, ordered them all to be cast into the fire. In great fear they handed
Judas over to her, saying, ‘This man is the son of one who was upright and a
prophet, and is precisely learned in the law beyond all of us. Detain this man
alone, and he will impart to you the desires of your heart.’^ And as they all
gave testimony as one, she dismissed them apart from Judas, and calling him
to her, said, ‘Life and death are set before you; choose which you prefer’.
Judas said, ‘And who, placed in the wilderness with bread close by, eats
stones?’® And she said to him, ‘If then you wish to live, both on earth and in
heaven, tell me where is the Cross of Christ hidden?’ Judas said, ‘As is
contained in the records,^ it is three hundred and three years, and how can
we, latecomers as we are, learn the facts about the Cross and where it is
1 Cf. Acts 18.3. The Greek is himantomos in the version here translated, on which see
Borgehammar (1991), 238 and the Latin text on the word skeno(g)rafia.
2 Either he means simply a blood-relative of an earlier generation, or else he is already
speaking as a Christian, as though the apostles were his patriarchs.
3 Cf. Mark 15.39 and Matt. 27.54.
4 The name has been deferred, as is common in both Greek and biblical narratives: Luke
7.40 etc.
5 Reminiscent of Ps. 37.4, this phrase, on the lips of mandarins in the fourth century,
connotes a pious wish that is not to be satisfied without recourse to some uncommon measure:
Mark the Deacon, Life of Porphyry 36.
6 See the Latin text for the biblical references in these sentences.
7 It was only to be expected that the Jews would have their own records {hypomnemata) of
the Passion, to match those disseminated by the pagans under the title Acts of Pilate'. Eusebius,
Church History 1.9.3.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
hidden?’ The blessed Helena said to him, ‘How is it that so many generations
ago a war broke out in Ilium and those who died there are held in remem¬
brance, along with their sites and tombs?’^ And Judas said, ‘Begging your
pardon, mistress, from written accounts, but we have not even one in written
form’. The blessed Helena said, ‘A short while ago you confessed to me that
there are records’. Judas said, ‘Pardon me, I was guessing when I spoke’.
And the blessed Helena said, ‘I have the certain and inspired voice of the
holy gospel as to the place where Christ was crucified, just show me the so-
called Place of the Skull, and I on my own authority shall give orders to
everyone and have the earth of that place dug up, and the Lord God will fulfil
my desire’. Judas said, ‘Mistress, do as you will with me, for I am not
acquainted with the place, nor have I found anything written about it’. Then
the queen said to him, ‘I want you to understand that if you do not confess to
me I shall starve you to death ’} And having said this, she ordered him to be
thrust into a dry well, in which there was no water, and ordained that he
should remain there without food for seven days.
But after the seven days he cried out from the well of the pit,^ saying,
‘Pull me out and I shall show you the place Christ was crucified’. Then Judas
was pulled up from the well, and went to the place in which Christ had been
crucified. Not knowing, however, precisely where it was situated, he lifted
his voice, praying in the Hebrew language and speaking thus:
God, who madest heaven and earth, who with thy span hast measured the
heaven and hast the earth in thy hand, who sittest upon the chariot of the
Cheruhim, and these swim in their courses in the immeasurable light to
which human nature cannot attain, for it is thou who hast made them for thy
service; and they minister unto thee saying with ceaseless voice. Holy, holy,
holy, some of whom are also called the Chemhim, while some thou hast
placed in paradise to guard the tree of life, and these are called Seraphim."*
Thou, however, dost hold sovereignty over them, thou who didst consign the
1 See note to the Latin text.
2 The Latin contains only a threat to kill.
3 The word lakkos is used by the Septuagint at Genesis 37 of the pit in which Joseph was
imprisoned on the advice of his brother Judah. The author may also be glancing ironically at Jer.
2.13 where the faithlessness of Israel is likened to a dry well.
4 I have suggested in a note on the Latin that an authentic Jewish tradition may be
commemorated here. However, we should also take note of the theory of Borgehammar (1991),
176, that the author has misread 2 Enoch 21.1.
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THE DISCOVERY OF THE CROSS
87
disobedient angels to the depths of Tartarus,' and now they are beneath the
barricaded doors^ of the abyss, undergoing punishment until the end, and
they cannot speak against thy commandment. And now, sovereign Lord
God, if it is thy will that the son of Mary the beautiful dove,^ the one you
sent, should reign - for had he not been from thee he would not have done
such works of power, and had he not indeed been thy Son thou wouldst not
have raised him again from the dead - perform for us therefore this miracle.
As thou didst hear thy servant'* Moses and didst show to him the bones of our
brother Joseph^ when they were hidden, so too now. Lord, reveal to us thy
hidden treasure and where the Cross of Christ lies, cause to ascend from that
same place the smoke of the fragrance of sweetness, so that I also, sinner as
I am, shall believe in the crucified Christ, that he is the king of Israel and
saviour of the world and of Jerusalem,® unto the ages.
As soon as Judas had intoned this prayer the place was shaken, and a
mass of smoke, as it were the fragrance of aromas,^ ascended from that place,
so that Judas in wonder clapped both his hands, and said, Tn truth thou,
Christ, art saviour of the world, thou art the Son of the Living God. I give thee
thanks. Lord, because, unworthy as I am, thou hast not deemed me unworthy
to be a partaker® of thy grace. Wherefore I pray. Lord, that thou mayest not
be mindful of my sins, and mayest number me with thy first martyr^
1 Cf. Job 40.15 for this use of the Homeric name Tartarus to denote the infernal regions,
together with Testament of Solomon 6 and 1 Enoch 10 on the imprisonment of the fallen angels.
At 1 Enoch 20-21 the name of Tartarus and a word which seems to mean ‘chaotic’ are
juxtaposed.
2 This seems to be the meaning of this unusual pair of words - perhaps a fortified variant of
the ‘gates of hell’ at Matt. 16.18; cf. Rev. 1.18.
3 This may be the earliest application of Song of Songs 1.15 to Mary.
4 Borrowing the word therapon from Exod. 4.10 etc.
5 Some MSS add ‘in the river’. Borgehammar (1991), 176-77 notes that, whereas Gen.
50.25 does not say in what manner the bones of Joseph the patriarch were recovered, the story
that his bones were found in the Nile may be the subject of an allusion in Philo, On Dreams
2.109. The typology is dense here, for not only was Joseph imprisoned in a well (Gen. 37), but
the burial of his bones was interpreted by some Christians as an allegory of the sealing of the
tablets of the Law within the ark: see Ephraem, Nisibene Hymn 43.1. Borgehammar goes on to
point out that an analogy may be implied between the ark of the law and the casket of the Cross.
6 The reference to Jerusalem is peculiar to the Greek, which no doubt has in mind such
prophecies as Gen. 49.10, Isa. 28.16 and Rev. 21.2.
7 See the Latin on the significance of Eph. 5.2 and other references.
8 Cf. 2 Pet. 1.4, where Christians are said to be partakers {metokhoi) of the divine nature.
9 The title protomartyr was perhaps first applied to Stephen in Jerusalem and in the fourth
century.
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Stephen, seeing that I too am of his stock.And, having said this, Judas,
taking a spade, began to dig with the rest of the great multitude, and when
they had dug as far as twenty ells, they found three crosses buried. Judas
took these and brought them up to the city. Now those in Jerusalem were
waiting for the glory of God,^ and behold it was close to the ninth hour, and
Judas brought the three crosses to the queen. And she, receiving the crosses
with great joy, and clasping them said to him, ‘And how shall I know now
Judas, which is the cross of Christ? Eor we know that along with Jesus were
crucified two good-for-nothing robbers, as the evangelists write, and that the
three are equal.’ Then he placed them in the midst of the city, and behold
after a short time, a dead youth was brought in lying on a bed. And Judas,
full of joy and filled with spiritual understanding, took hold of the bed and
caused it to be put down on the ground, saying to the queen, ‘Now you see,
mistress, which is the desired Cross, and the power of it’. And as he placed
the two crosses, one by one, upon the dead man, no sign occurred with them.
But when he came to the third Cross and placed it upon the corpse, forthwith
the gates of death were opened, and the dead youth arose, and to all was
revealed the glory of God. Thereupon many of the Jews, seeing the
immediate resurrection of the corpse, believed in our Lord Jesus Christ.
Upon the occurrence of this great wonder, there came a voice from the air; it
was that of the devil, saying in fury, ‘Who is this who does not permit me to
receive human souls? Jesus of Nazareth, you have drawn them all to you and
has your Cross once more been revealed against me? Judas, why have you
done this? Eor it was through Judas the traitor that I first caused the people of
Israel to go astray; and now through a Judas I am driven hence. I too shall
devise a Judas plan, and carry it out against you, for using my authority and
power I shall contrive to raise another king, who will forsake the crucified
one and readily follow my counsels and my will.^ You I shall give over to
terrible and manifold torments, so that after long retribution you will deny
the crucified one.’ Judas heard this, and enraged against the unclean spirit, he
said, ‘Wicked demon, may Christ who has raised the dead drag you down to
1 The Greek word is genos; but notwithstanding the genealogy constructed for him in the
present text, Acts 6.5 implies that Stephen was a Gentile.
2 Cf. Matt. 15.43 (‘waiting for the kingdom’). The crowd appears to be engaged in
commemoration of the Passion, hence the significance of the ninth hour, which marks the time
at which Jesus expired (Mark 15.34 etc.).
3 See notes to the Latin text on Cyriacus’ martyrdom under Julian.
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the lowest abyss of fire^ for your own destruction’. And on hearing this the
devil forthwith became invisible.
The blessed Helena glorified the power of God and wondered at the faith
of Judas. Then the blessed Helena shielded the precious Cross of Christ
very securely in gold and precious stones, and, having constructed a silver
casket, she used it to shield for the Cross in a dignified and honourable
manner. And having ordained the building of a church on the Place of the
Skull, she deposited the Cross in the church to be guarded; as for Judas, once
he had received the washing^ of faith in Christ, she presented him to the
bishop of that time. But while the blessed Helena was still dwelling in
Jerusalem, it came to pass that the most holy bishop rested^ in the Lord. The
blessed Helena therefore summoned the bishop of Rome, Eusebius by
name,"* and he installed Judas as bishop to govern the church of Christ,
having changed his name to Cyriacus. Now the thrice-blessed Helena,
schooled as she was in the power of the law of God, had also learned with
precision the teachings of the new instruction of Christ; recalling the
statements of the holy scriptures, she next resolved to search for the nails
that had been fixed in the Cross of Christ. So a second search began, and the
blessed Helena said to Judas, who was also called Cyriacus, ‘Although the
desire that I had with regard to the wood of the Cross has been fulfilled, yet
great sadness rests upon me on account of the nails that were fixed in it.
Therefore I shall have no peace until the Lord has fulfilled my desire in this
matter too.’ Then the holy bishop Cyriacus, coming to the Place of the Skull
along with many brothers who had believed in our Lord Jesus Christ on
account of the finding of the Sacred Cross and the resurrection of the corpse,
lifted his eyes to heaven and beat his breast with his hands, praying
strenuously to the Lord. He made a long prayer in the Hebrew tongue^ that
1 For the geography of Hell cf. 1 Enoch 21.
2 That is, baptism, which is described as a washing at 1 Cor. 6.11 and Tit. 3.5. The wording
(a partial echo of Gal. 3.26-27) implies that faith ought to accompany the rite, though this need
not exclude a practice of infant baptism, which was common throughout the Church in this
author’s day. Here it is not said that Judas was baptized in the name of the Trinity, as
Constantine was; baptism in the name of Jesus alone is the usual rite in Acts, and Cyprian,
Letter 63 explains that it was reserved for Jews, who already knew the Creator as their Father.
3 ‘Sleeping in Christ’ is a Pauline synonym for death: 1 Thess. 4.14. Not so common in
prose as in verse among pagan Greeks, the usage may have gained currency among Christians
because it was attributed to Christ at Matt. 9.24 and John 11.11.
4 Here introduced for the first time, though in the Latin and Syriac he is already the minister
of baptism to Constantine; see notes to the Latin at this point.
5 The words ‘in the Hebrew tongue’ are not in the Latin.
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the nails fixed in the Cross would also be revealed to him; the prayer went on
for a long time, and he had pronounced the Amen, when a sign occurred
which was also witnessed by the bystanders, for a glow like a flash of
lightning shone forth from that place. The nails of the Cross shone too in that
place, flashing like gold more than the rays of the sun, so that all, without
doubting, said ‘We know now in whom we have believed’.^ Receiving them
with great awe, the bishop presented them to Helena, God’s favourite, who
on beholding them fell to her knees and bowed her head, and with great awe
she thanked the Lord, the giver of good things.
As she was pondering deeply what she was to do with the glorious nails,
the wisdom of God put it into her mind to be the cause of great salvation to
forthcoming generations. And calling to her a man of great faith and wisdom,
she said to him, ‘Honour the King’s command and the mystery.^ Take the
nails and make from them a bit in the rein of a horse on which the King sits,
and they will be an invincible weapon against all his adversaries - victory
for the King and peace from war.’ And he took them and did what was
commanded. This was so that what was said by the prophet might be
fulfilled: And it shall be in those days that what is in the rein of the King’s
horse will be called holy to the Lord? The blessed Helena had confirmed her
faith in Jerusalem and completed everything in a holy, righteous and pious
manner; having bequeathed many funds to the most holy bishop Cyriacus
for his ministry to the poor, she also launched a persecution against the Jews,
and those who had not believed in Christ the Saviour were driven from
Judaea and scattered throughout the earth.^ And such was the grace that was
given the holy Bishop Cyriacus that he even drove out demons by his word
1 Cf. 2Tim. 1.12.
2 Matt. 13.11 and Eph. 5.22 appear to authorize the use of the term musterion as a synonym
for ‘parable’ (cf. Justin, Trypho 68.4). But Helena, in applying the term to a relic of the Cross,
may have in mind the Pauline use of it to denote God’s hidden purpose as revealed in Christ, and
especially the disclosure of the true intent of scripture in opposition of the Jews (Rom. 11.25).
When Christians began to describe their feats in the vocabulary of the pagan rites, it was
naturally the eucharist or pascha that was reckoned to be the mystery par excellence, as already
in Melito’s paschal homily of the second century (p. 2.7), and the Passion itself is spoken of as
‘the mystery’ by authors such as Cyril of Alexandria, To Nestorius 3.6.
3 Zech. 14.20 in the Septuagint (the Hebrew says nothing of a king). See note on the Latin
text.
4 Whereas the Latin speaks of a persecution, the Greek word diasparesas recalls the
dispersal {diaspora) of the Jews by Hadrian in 135, which is commemorated with pleasure by
Eusebius, Church History. If, as I have suggested in the introduction, this narrative was
originally set in the reign of Domitian, the penalty will have been inflicted by Hadrian himself.
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and breath.' Now [Helena] took the precious and holy wood of the most
venerable and life-giving^ Cross, along with the holy and august nails by
which Christ our God^ allowed himself to be transfixed for our sake, and set
them up in Jerusalem and Byzantium. Perfect in faith, piously revering the
holy and consubstantial'' Trinity, and having spread the faith of Christians in
every place where she had tarried, she fell asleep,^ enjoining all who
believed in Christ to celebrate in remembrance of the day on which the Holy
Cross was found, the fourteenth of the month of September,® so that all those
who keep the Cross in remembrance may receive the portion of the Mother
of God and all the saints, through our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be glory
and majesty, now and always and unto ages of ages.’ Amen.
1 The fourth-century Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Homilies 16.19 and 20.3 is
the first witness to the role of breath {emphusema) in the exorcism of demons, though the breath
of Christ had already infused the Holy Spirit into his apostles at John 20.22.
2 The term zoopoios (applied to Christ at 1 Cor. 15.45) is used of a pictorial representation
of the Cross, though not of the relic itself, by Eusebius, Tricennalian Oration 9 (p. 219.8
Heikel).
3 Christ is styled our God as early as Tit. 2.13; the corollary that God died on the Cross,
though freely stated in a Paschal Homily by the second-century Melito of Sardis, was seldom
drawn so explicitly as in the present passage by ecclesiastical writers of the fifth century (see
e.g. Cyril of Alexandria, Third Letter to Nestorius, anathema 12, which states only that God the
Word tasted death for us).
4 The term introduced at the Council of Nicaea in 325 as a test of clerical orthodoxy. It
means that the Second Person of the Trinity shares the nature of the Father, and by the late
fourth century was taken to imply that that there is no gradation in dignity between them. No
conciliar formula declares (although the Nicene Fathers certainly believed) that the Holy Spirit
is consubstantial with the Father, and the epithet would not have found its way into Helena’s
orisons to the Trinity, or indeed into any such prayer before the late fourth century.
5 Cf. John 11.11, 1 Thess. 4.13.
6 According to Borgehammar (1991), 100, this was the Encaenia of the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre. See the Latin for a different date.
7 The familiar termination of the Lord’s Prayer, found neither in Luke nor in Matthew, but
first at Didache 9.2 or at 1 Clement 38.
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1 . In the name of the holy and indivisible' Trinity, namely the Father,
the Son and the Holy Spirit,^ the Emperor Caesar Flavius Constantine, in
Christ Jesus, one of that same Holy Trinity, our Saviour^ the Lord God,
[Constantine] the faithful, benign'' and beneficent, the pious, fortunate and
triumphant victor over the Alemanni,^ Goths,® Sarmatians,^ Germans,*
1 The assertion that the Father, Son and Spirit are indivisible, and therefore one, is an axiom
of all Trinitarian arguments after the Council of Nicaea in 325. It may have found its way into
a confession when the would-be-orthodox heretic Marcellus of Ancyra appealed to the bishop
of Rome in 341. For his creed see Epiphanius, Panarion 72.2-3, with Kinzig and Vincent
(1999), 550-52.
2 Not an entirely gratuitous amplification, as the first Christian who is known to have used
the Greek word trias, Theophilus of Antioch {To Autolycus 2.15), named the three as Father,
Logos and Sophia. Although the Greek word trias has a wider sense than our word ‘Trinity’, the
essentials of Trinitarian theology after 325 were always that: (a) God is Father, Son and Spirit;
(b) the Son and Spirit both depend for their existence on the Father; (c) each of the three has its
distinct or hypostatic existence; (d) none the less, there is one God, indivisible and unchanged.
3 Meaning Christ, if this is an echo of Tit. 2.13, and the verse is so interpreted as to make
‘God’ and ‘Saviour’ titles of the same party. Huyghebaert (1976), 61 observes that the title
Saviour is employed in the Donation even where it did not appear in the Acts of Silvester, and
draws the tenuous inference (cf. Huyghebaert (1979), 181-82) that the author was a cleric, not
a monk.
4 Mirbt and Aland (1967), 251 and Fuhrmann (1968) add the epithet Maximus, ‘supreme’.
5 A variant of this title, Alamannicus, is attested in an inscription cited by Barnes (1976c),
150; for numismatic and epigraphic evidence of the occasion see Barnes (1981), 66 and n. 31.
Cf. Latin Panegyrics 4(10).18, although the title Alamannicus is not attested here or in any
literary account of Constantine. Consequently, unless he possessed an accurate written source
that we have lost, there is good reason for suspecting that author has transfeiTed to him a title of
Theodosius {Panegyrics 2(12).5), or else that he wishes Constantine to anticipate the victory of
Clovis, the founder of the Frankish kingdom, over this people. Gregory of Tours, History of the
Franks 1.30 clearly has the Milvian Bridge in mind when he asserts that this was the battle in
which Clovis turned to Christ and that his baptism was an almost immediate sequel.
6 Following Eutropius, Breviary 10.7.1, Barnes (1976c), 153 opines that it was only after
324 that Constantine acquired the title Gothicus in his own right, though he may have shai'ed an
eaidier accolade with Galerius (Eusebius, Church History 8.17.3). A late victory over this
Germanic people is also recorded by Eusebius, Constantine 4.5.1; Aurelius Victor, Caesars 41
names only the Goths and Sarmatians as Constantine’s adversaries, while Epitome on the
Caesars 41 thinks only the Goths worthy of record.
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Britons' and Huns,^ ever Augustus:^ to the most holy and blessed father of
fathers'* Silvester,^ bishop and pope® of the city of Rome, and to all of his
7 Though the last campaign against the Sarmatians is the most famous (Eusebius,
Constantine 4.320), Barnes (1976c), 149 deduces from the position of the epithet Sarmaticus in
an inscription that a victory must have taken place within a year of Constantine’s accession in
306. See further the Latin version of the Advent of the Holy Cross in this volume.
8 As many as four such victories can be verified from Latin Panegyrics 7(6).4.2, 6(7). 10.2,
4(10).16.5 and other sources attested in Barnes (1976c).
1 Possibly an allusion to a campaign against the Piets which he undertook with his father
Constantins: see Latin Panegyrics 6(7).7. When the title Britannicus appears in inscriptions of
315 and 318, however, Barnes (1976c), 153-54 suggests that it refers to small excursions later
in his reign.
2 Only in the late fourth century did Roman emperors start to claim victories against this
people; again our author may have borrowed the royal nomenclature of Theodosius the Great at
Latin Panegyrics 2(12).11 and 2(12).32. Or - and this would be another testimony to his
learning, if not his acumen - he may have been acquainted with the inaccurate tradition of the
Byzantine life at Opitz (1934), 568. He may also have had in mind the frequent wars of
Chaidemagne against these foes: Einhard, Life of Charlemagne 13, Annals of the Franks for
year 790 etc.
3 The title conferred by the Senate on Octavian, the founder of the Principate, in 27 BC. It
was borne by subsequent emperors, and was more than a formality to Constantine, whose
panegyrics frequently liken him to the first Augustus.
4 Implying that the bishop of Rome is the supreme patriarch, but avoiding that Greek term,
which (notwithstanding Isidore of Seville, Origins 7.12.4 and the use of patriarchium by Pope
Stephen at Mirbt and Aland (1967), 115) was seldom used in the west. This passage may be
intended as a rebuttal of the pretensions of the bishop of Constantinople to be the ‘oecumenical’
(i.e. worldwide) patriarch. Cf. the expostulatory letter of Gregory the Great to John of
Constantinople (595 AD) in Mirbt and Aland (1967), 244^5.
5 Bishop of Rome from 31 January 314 to 31 December 335, and thus the one whose tenure
spans almost the entirety of the reign of Constantine. None the less, little is known of relations
between him and the emperor, with the exception of the many endowments enumerated in the
Book of Pontijfs, where the life of Silvester is the longest before the eighth century. Both
Yarnold (1993), 96 and Fowden (1994b), 156-57 find the first evidence of Silvester’s role in a
homily by Jacob of Serug, written c. 500 and studied at length by Frothingham (1883). He
appears as the minister of Constantine’s baptism in LP, p. 75 Duchesne. This account can claim
more verisimilitude than that which makes Eusebius of Rome the celebrant, since the latter’s
tenure of the Roman see ended at least four years before Constantine’s conversion.
6 This word appears to derive from a colloquial Greek equivalent for patriarch, which was
applied to bishops of a number of sees, especially Alexandria. In the west it is bestowed on a
local bishop at Passion of Perpetua 13.3, on the bishop of Rome or Carthage by Tertullian, On
Decorum 13, on Cyprian of Carthage by the antipope Novatian in the superscriptions to letters
30 and 31 of Cyprian’s correspondence, and on Silvester himself in a somewhat barbed epistle
from the prelates at the Council of Arles in 314 (Optatus, Against the Donatists, appendix 4).
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successors,' who shall sit in the chair of Peter^ up to the end of the age, and
furthermore to all the most reverend^ and God-beloved catholic"* bishops
who are subject to that same most holy Roman church throughout the whole
earth according to this imperial constitution of ours,^ established as they are
for all foregoing times as well as for the present and for posterity. Grace,
peace, love, joy, long-suffering and mercy® be with you all from God the
Eather Almighty, and Jesus Christ his Son, and the Holy Spirit.
2. As to the things that our Saviour and redeemer the Lord Jesus Christ, Son
of the Most High Eather, has done in his wondrous condescension, through
his holy apostles Peter and Paul with the mediation of our father’ Silvester,
1 Rome was the first bishopric to possess a list of successive incumbents from apostolic
times: the one preserved by Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.2, was preceded by that of Hegesippus
and succeeded by others, culminating in the Book of Pontiffs. There is strong agreement
between the lists, but not perfect unanimity, and there is even less agreement among modem
scholars as to when Rome came to function as a monarchical episcopate, rather than as a synod
with the ‘bishop’ as its chairman. See Brent (1995) on Roman governance; Molland (1950) on
the nature of the succession; Turner (1916/17) on dispaiities between the pontifical lists.
2 At some time this became a physical artefact, according to Ruysschaert (1973), though we
may be sure that it was not yet so in the reign of Constantine. Optatus, Against the Donatists 2.2
makes Peter a bishop, not merely the appointer of bishops as in Irenaeus, and speaks of his seat
or cathedra.
3 As elsewhere, Migne reads reverendissimis where Mirbt and Aland (1967) regularly read
reverentissimis.
4 First attested in Ignatius, Smyrnaeans 8.3, this term implies that certain rites and doctrines
are common to the Church as a whole and cannot be ignored or contravened by any local
congregation without incurring the charge of schism. Most of those who held this view inferred
that it was the privilege and duty of the bishops to collaborate in preserving the mle of faith.
Constantine’s devotion to catholicity is attested (for example) by his letters in appendices 3 and
9 to Optatus, Against the Donatists.
5 The fact that this decree puiports to create, or at least to ratify, the precedence of the
Roman see would have made it unpalatable to the early bishops, such as Leo the Great, who
held that Rome owed its precedence to its apostolic foundation. A similar scruple in the early
middle ages led to the deletion of a reference to Constantine’s decree in version (B) of the Acts
of Silvester. Pohlkamp (1988), 444—45.
6 Grace and peace ai‘e the usual terms in Pauline salutations (Rom. 1.7, 1 Cor. 1.3, Gal. 1.3,
Eph. 1.3, Phil. 1.2, Col. 1.1, 1 Thess. 1.1); 1 Tim. 1.3 adds mercy, but the nearest parallel to this
roll of virtues is Gal. 5.22.
7 Cf. Philemon 10 and Gal. 4.19 for the notion that one who converts another is his spiritual
father.
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THE EDICT OF CONSTANTINE TO POPE SILVESTER
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supreme pontiff^ and universal pope - our most benign Serenity has taken
pains to publish a clear account of these in the text of this imperial
constitution^ of ours, so that it may come to the knowledge of all people
throughout the earth. First, for the instruction of all your minds we profess,
and confess from the depths of the heart, our faith in which we have been
schooled by the aforesaid Silvester, the universal pontiff and our own most
blessed father and advocate,^ and thereby we proclaim the mercy of God
which has been shed upon us.
3. Our purpose is that you should know, as we revealed through that earlier
holy and pragmatic'' ordinance of ours, that we have turned away from the
worship of idols, from images mute and deaf, the work of hands,^ from
diabolical inventions, and from all the mummery of Satan,® and have
attained to the perfect faith of Christians, which is the true light and ever¬
lasting life.^ Following the instruction of the same most bountiful pontiff
Silvester, our supreme father and teacher, we believe in God the Father
Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of things visible and invisible; and
1 Throughout this text the bishop of Rome is styled the pontifex, and even pontifex maximus.
Originally the pontifices were only one of four Roman priesthoods, but the title pontifex
maximus (‘great pontiff’) was united to that of princeps by Augustus, and was retained by all
the emperors, including Constantine, until it was formally renounced by Gratian. It had indeed
been used as a designation of a leading western bishop in Tertullian’s On Modesty (c. 216 AD),
but evidently with insulting purpose. We do, however, find the title religionis pontifex in a letter
of the Roman synod to Gratian and Valentinian I, so it is clear that as soon as the emperors laid
it down the word began to lend its ancient dignity to the pretensions of the Roman bishopric.
See Pohlkamp (1988), 474 n. 30; at Pohlkamp (1988), 483 n. 255 we find that the priests of the
Capitol are called pontifices in ih^Acts of Silvester.
2 Hence the alternative title, Constitutum Constantini, used by Fuhrmann (1968).
3 As in Salvian, Letter 8, the word orator seems here to signify one who prays effectually
for another.
4 For ‘pragmatic’ see below; royal ordinances are sancta, like those of the Senate, because
the Latin verb sancire means to pass a law with due formality.
5 Of many Old Testament passages, the most similar in content are Ps. 115.4—7 (114.4-7
Vulgate) and 135.15-17 (134.15-17 Vulgate). Raymond Davis points out to me that the former
was used regularly in Roman worship in the ninth century.
6 A phrase introduced into Christian pai'lance by Tertullian, On Shows 12 and 24, and also
found in the Acts of Silvester. Pohlkamp (1988), 480 n. 246. The renunciation of Satan is part of
the baptismal liturgy: Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition 21.9.
7 Cf. John 1.4.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
in Jesus Christ his only-begotten^ Son, our Lord,^ through whom all things
were made; and in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, giver of life to all creation.
These, the Lather, Son and Holy Spirit, we confess in such a manner that in
the Trinity there is the perfect fulness of divinity and unity of power. The
Lather is God, the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God, and the three are
one in Christ Jesus.^ Thus there are three forms, but one power.'*
4 . Lor God who had always been wise^ brought forth his Word from
himself,® through whom it was always his plan to produce the temporal
world.^ And when he had formed the universal creation from nothing® by the
agency of this same sole Word of his wisdom,® he was with him, arranging
1 But Mirbt and Aland (1967), 251 and Fuhrmann (1968), 60 read ‘only’, rather than
imigenitus. The Greek term monogenes (John 1.18 etc.) could be rendered in Latin either as
unicus (‘unique’) or as unigenitus (‘only begotten’). The former is characteristic of the fourth
century, and appears in the Apostles’ Creed as cited by Kelly (1972), 369. Elsewhere unicus was
generally superseded by unigenitus in the liturgy to make it proof against an Arian interpretation.
2 Mirbt and Aland (1967), 251 add the word Deus, ‘God’.
3 Cf. verses 15 and 16 of the so-called Athanasian Creed at Heurtley (1911), 4; here there
appears to be also a loose reminiscence of Col. 2.9. Brewer (1909), 16 traces the formula to the
so-called Faith ofDamasus, perhaps a Spanish forgery of the fifth century, but at 18-19 he notes
that it occurs in a Veronese manuscript of the Athanasian Creed, and sees a forerunner at
Ambrose, On the Holy Spirit 3.82 (‘God the Father is adored in Christ’).
4 This statement is unequal to the mystery of unity in trinity, but the author is in good
company: cf. Athenagoras, Embassy 10 (second century); Origen, Dialogue with Heraclides
2.27 (third century); Ambrose, On Luke 2.66 (fourth century).
5 Cf. Jude 25. ‘Constantine’ seems to imagine a chronological beginning to the discrete or
hypostatic existence of the creative Word. This was denied by Origen, On First Principles 1.2.1
as well as by many orthodox Christians after Nicaea, on the grounds that the Father was never
without his wisdom. ‘Constantine’ here anticipates this objection by alluding to the distinction
between the two meanings of the word logos and thus tacitly subscribing to the opinion of
Tertullian (Against Praxeas 5) that Christ was eternally present to the Father as his ratio or
reason, but then projected as his sermo or speech for the creation of the world.
6 That is, he is of the substance of God the Father, as the Nicene Creed of 325 affirmed,
rather than a creation out of nothing, as Anus held (Theodoret, Church History 1.5), or a
product of the Father’s will, as Origen surmised: First Principles 4.4.1(28).
7 An answer to the question what God was doing before he created the world; cf. Augustine,
City of God 12.4—5.
8 As May (1994) demonstrates, this had become an article of Christian faith by the end of
the second century, as an antidote to the teaching of the ‘Gnostics’ that the world was made
from pre-existent matter or from the divided substance of the Godhead.
9 Christ is the word or logos of God at John 1.1, and the subsequent text declares that he was
the universal instrument of creation. This is the role assigned to Wisdom at Wis. 7.25-26, which
is echoed in Heb. 1.3 and Col. 1.15. To authors such as Arius and Origen it was a natural
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all hidden purposes by his own secret counsel.' Thus when the powers of
heaven had been perfected, along with all the materials of the earth, by the
pious bidding of his own wisdom, he fashioned the first human being from
the mud of the earth in his own image and likeness,^ and placed him in a
paradise of pleasure. From the same joys this man was exiled by the ancient
serpent,^ his jealous enemy the devil,'' through the most bitter taste of the
forbidden tree; and, this man once expelled, the devil did not desist from
shooting forth his envenomed darts in many ways,^ so that, leading the
human race astray from the path of truth, he could persuade it to serve the
worship of idols, that is to say the creation rather than the Creator.® By this
he ensured that those whom he was able to ensnare by his intrigues should
burn along with him in eternal punishment.’
But our God, taking pity on his own handiwork,* sent his own holy
prophets and through them announced the light of the future life,® that is the
advent of his own Son, the Lord God and our Saviour Jesus Christ, and then
sent that same only-begotten Son of his, who was also the Word of his
wisdom. Descending from the heavens for our salvation, he was bom from
inference to identify Christ with the Wisdom who accompanies God in Prov. 8.22, even though
the translation in the Septuagint implies that she was created. Both the translation and the
application of this passage were contested after Nicaea, but authority for entitling Christ the
wisdom of God, insofar as he reveals God’s secret counsel, can be found at 1 Cor. 1.19-24, if
not at Luke 11.49.
1 The Latin word is mysterium\ cf. Col. 1.26, 1 Cor. 2.7 etc. Wisdom declares that she was
with God at the creation at Prov. 8.30, and the same is said of the Word at John 1.1-2. Raymond
Davis observes that such texts inspired the antiphonal hymn O Sapientia (‘Oh Wisdom’) in the
eight or ninth century.
2 Combining Gen. 1.26-27 with Gen. 2.7, ignoring both the apparent contradictions
between the accounts and the possibility (hinted at by Gen. 1.27 and taken up by Origen, First
Principles 3.6.1) that the image was initially conferred without the likeness, which was to be
perfected by the Holy Spirit (cf. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.6).
3 See Gen. 3.1, with Rev. 12.9 and 20.2, the only text in scripture where the seipent is
identified as the devil.
4 Cf. 1 Pet. 5.8 on the enmity of the devil, and Wis. 2.24 on his jealousy.
5 Cf. Ps. 91.5-6 (90.6 Vulgate) for the coupling of arrows with the noonday demon.
6 Cf. Rom. 1.19-20, though here the devil is not blamed, as he was by Augustine and other
ancient Christians.
7 Cf. Eph. 6.11; Matt. 25.41. On the devil’s companions in perdition see Rev. 12.4.
8 Conflating the thought of verses such as Rom. 5.6-8 with the language of Plato, Symposium
191b.
9 Cf. Isa. 60.1 (‘arise, shine, for thy light is come’) and John 1.4: ‘the light was the life of
men’.
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the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary,' and as the Word made flesh he made
his home among us.^ He did not relinquish what he had been, but he became
what he had not been.^ Through the preaching of our father Silvester, the
supreme pontiff, we understand that he was perfect God and perfect man,
working miracles as God and sustaining human passions as man,"' at once a
human word and the Word of God;^ and thus we are in no doubt that he was
both true God and true man. And having chosen twelve apostles, he shone
among them by his miracles,® and among countless others of the popular
multitude. We confess that the same Lord Jesus Christ fulfilled the law and
the prophets,^ that he suffered and was crucified according to the scriptures,*
that he rose from the dead on the third day, was taken up into the heavens,
and that, seated at the right hand of the Lather, he will come from there to
judge the living and the dead, and that his kingdom will have no end.®
1 The virgin birth is recorded in Matt. 1.18-24 and Luke 1.35. In the early second century it
is part of the confession of Ignatius at Ephesians 7.2, but it does not occur in the Nicene Creed
of 325, though a little earlier Bishop Alexander of Alexandria had seen fit to include it in his
definition of faith: Theodoret, Church History 1.4; Kelly (1972), 188-89; Fr. 14 Opitz (1934).
After 341, when it occurs in the apology of Marcellus of Ancyra, it becomes an indispensable
clause in every creed, and was included in that version of the Nicene Creed which appears to
have been endorsed in 381 at the Council of Constantinople and continues to be recited in
Christian churches. See Heurtley (1911), 10, 12, 15, 21, together with Kinzig and Vinzent
(1999), 551.
2 John 1.18.
3 An important caveat to all orthodox writers of antiquity, expressed with greater technical
precision as clause 33 in the Athanasian Creed at Heurtley (1911), 44.
4 The standard Latin theology, as we meet it in Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ 9-13, as
well as in the Tome to Flavian of Leo the Great {Letter 128, 449 AD).
5 Verbum hominem and verbum Dei. Mirbt and Aland (1967), 253 andFuhrmann (1968), 64
prefer a different reading, which states simply, with the Nicene Creed, that Christ was true God
{verum Deum) and true man {verum hominem).
6 Cf. Matt. 4.16.
7 Cf. Matt. 5.17.
8 As we are told at Luke 24.27, Mark 14.21, and 1 Cor. 15.3, notwithstanding the absence of
any prophecy of a suffering Messiah in the Old Testament. On the authority of Acts 8, most
interpreters have looked to Isaiah 53, along with Hos. 6.2. Mirbt and Aland (1967), 253
punctuate the passage so that the resuiTection rather than the ciucifixion is said to take place
according to the scriptures, thus making this text concur with the Nicene formula and with 1
Cor. 15.4.
9 See Heurtley (1911), 10, 12, 15, 21 for credal statements of this dogma, which, although
it seems to contradict 1 Cor. 15.28, was even endorsed by Marcellus of Ancyra: Epiphanius,
Panarion 72.2; Kinzig and Vinzent (1999), 551.
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5. Yes, this is our catholic faith,' as it was vouchsafed to us by our most
blessed father Silvester the supreme pontiff. For this cause we exhort every
people, and the folk of the divers nations, to hold, cultivate and proclaim this
faith, and to seek the grace of baptism in the name of the holy Trinity,^ and
with devout hearts to adore our Lord Jesus Christ, our Saviour, who with the
Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns through unending ages, the one
whom Silvester our most blessed father proclaims, being universal pontiff.
6. For this same Lord of ours,^ having taken pity on me a sinner,'' sent his
holy apostles^ to visit us, and infused into us the radiance of his splendour,
so that I might rejoice in my rescue from the shadows and my arrival at the
true light and the knowledge of the truth. For when a virulent and blighting
leprosy possessed the whole flesh of my body,® and many doctors had
1 The Nicene Creed of 325 anathematizes errors in the name of the catholic church - Kelly
(1972), 216-and an interpolated passage 'miho. Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus 21 states that
the neophyte will receive instruction in the catholic faith: see Dix and Chadwick (1968), 35-36.
The sentence attributed here to Constantine, however, does not contain the word catholica in
any of the MSS consulted by Fuhrmann (1968). It may have been inserted to echo the
peroration of the so-called Athanasian Creed, composed in Latin and probably in Gaul some
time after 400: see Heurtley (1911), 42 and 27, with Brewer (1909), 16 on the Faith of
Damasus, a precursor of the Athanasian Creed which appears to have been quanred in other
parts of the Donation.
2 As ordained by Christ, Matt. 28.19.
3 Fowden (1994b) conjectures that this story was concocted as an antidote to one put about
by the pagan emperor Julian (Caesars 336a-b; Against the Galilaeans, Fr. 57), denied by the
Christian Sozomen (Church History 1.5.1) and endorsed on the authority of Eunapius by the
anti-Christian Zosimus (New History 2.29). According to this, it was only after Constantine had
put his son to death on a specious charge in 326 that he was forced to turn to the bishops for the
absolution that the pagan priests refused to grant him.
4 CfLuke 17.13; 1 Tim. 1.13.
5 The term ‘apostle’ originally denoted those ‘sent out’ to proclaim the kingdom of God
(Matt. 10.2 etc.). Peter was of the number, but Paul was not; nevertheless he declares himself an
apostle at Gal. 1.1 and 1 Cor. 9.1, and Gal. 2.8 implies that he was acknowledged in Jerusalem
as the apostle to the Gentiles. Raymond Davis reminds me that in Rome the term ‘apostolic’
was generally used with exclusive reference to Peter and Paul, the putative founders of the
church there.
6 This story appears to have originated in the Acts of the Blessed Silvester, and is based
partly, as Valla, Donat. 4.12 (p. 9 Schwahn) perceived, on the healing of Naaman the Syrian by
Elisha at 2 Kings 5. The point is admitted in the Acts of Silvester, where the leprosy is defined
as elephantiasis: see Pohlkamp (1988), 461 n. 248. Fowden (1994b) also compares the
miraculous cure of King Abgar of Edessa by Christ himself at Eusebius, HE 1.13. We should
also remember the cure of Uzziah at 2 Kgs 7.1-15, if only because Jerome offered an exposition
of it to Pope Damasus at Letter 18.1.
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gathered to apply their cures, yet we had not been rewarded with health by
any of their cures,* the priests of the Capitol^ came on this account, saying
that a font ought to be made for me on the Capitol, that this should be filled
with the blood of infants, and that when it ran warm I could be cleansed by
washing in it. And in accordance with their assertions, I had collected a great
many innocent infants,^ and the sacrilegious priests of the pagans were
intent on sacrificing them and filling the font with their blood; but our
Serenity, perceiving the tears of their mothers, felt an immediate abhorrence
of the crime. Taking pity on them,'* we bade that their sons should be
restored to them, and, having furnished vehicles and bestowed gifts, we let
them go rejoicing to their own.
7. Thus that day passed, and once the silence of the night had fallen upon us,
when the time of sleep had arrived,^ the apostles St Peter and St Paul®
1 On the impotence of doctors cf. Mark 5.26; as Luke 4.23 reminds us, Christ is the true
physician, both of body and of spirit. Pohlkamp (1988), 453-54 suggests that the episode is
designed as a retort to the healing miracles reported of the god Asclepius, and at 454 n. 152 he
quotes Paulinus of Nola, 19.45-56, where Peter and Paul are linked with Christ as instruments
of healing.
2 The Capitol (Campidoglio), though by no means the highest eminence in Rome, housed
the citadel and the temples of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. At the temple of Jupiter Optimus
Maximus (Best and Greatest) spoils were dedicated and sacrifices offered on behalf of the
Roman state. We are therefore to understand that the priests will have represented the massacre
of the little ones as a public duty, not merely as a private remedy. In a Byzantine life of
Constantine, similar counsels are followed by Maxentius: chapter 11 at Lieu and Montserrat
(1996), 117. Constantine himself rejects their overtures before the atrocity can be completed,
and only then receives his vision: chapter 15 at Lieu and Montserrat (1996), 119-21.
3 Cf. Acts of Silvester at Pohlkamp (1988), 449 nn. 132, 135. Though different both in
motive and in outcome, the project is reminiscent of Herod’s massacre at Matt. 2.16. Pohlkamp
(1988), 450 also sees an allusion to the taurobolium, or baptism in the blood of bulls, which was
practised in the mysteries of Mithras and Cybele. At 483 n. 255 Pohlkamp notes that a slaughter
of infants is attributed to the odious Elagabalus at Augustan History, Elagabalus 8 - a largely
fictitious record, almost contemporary with the first version of the Acts of Silvester, and
evincing strong hostility to Constantine. We may add that at Zosimus, New History 2.29,
Constantine puts his wife Fausta to death by immersion in boiling water, and that this is one of
the crimes for which he seeks to make amends by his conversion.
4 Showing the philanthropy already ascribed to God in Chapters 4 and 6.
5 This is the hour when dreams are true, as Horace reminds us at Satires 1.10.33, recounting
the occasion when he was visited by the patron deity of pagan Rome.
6 The association of Peter and Paul with the church in Rome is ancient. Paul wrote a letter
to the congregation, while one in Peter’s name is often assumed to be referring to the city of
persecution under the name of ‘Babylon’ (1 Pet. 5.13). Ignatius, Romans 4.3 already pairs the
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presented themselves, saying to me: ‘seeing that you have put an end to the
atrocities and have shown abhorrence of shedding innocent blood, we have
been sent from Christ our Lord and God, to give you advice on the recovery
of your health. Hear therefore our admonitions, and do whatever we tell you:
Silvester,' the bishop of the city,^ has fled before your persecutions^ to the
Mount of Soracte,'* and keeps to a hiding place^ along with his clergy in the
caves of the rock.® When you have had this man brought to you, he will show
you the bathing-pool of piety, and when you have immersed yourself in this
two, as does Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.2, where the first presbyter or bishop of the Roman
church is said to have been appointed by their joint authority. As Pohlkamp (1988), 453-57
shows at length, they can also be regarded as the ‘Christian Dioscuri’, supplanting the glorified
heroes Castor and Pollux who had hitherto been the guardians of the city and its armies. See
especially the inscription of Damasus at Pohlkamp (1988), 457 n. 160.
1 One might suspect the author of a pun if we could be sure that he knew Pliny the Elder,
Natural History 20.144, in which we are twice informed that a plant of the woods (silvestris) is
a cure for elephantiasis.
2 The name of Rome is printed by Mirbt and Aland (1967), 254 and by Fuhrmann (1968),
70, but does not appear in Migne.
3 Constantine was a signatory to the palinode of Galerius in 311, which while it repealed the
persecution did not cease to condone it (Eusebius, Church History 8.17.3). The of Silvester
states that he oppressed the Church at the instigation of Maximiana, his wife and the daughter
of his predecessor and sometime colleague Maximian (see Duchesne at LP 1, cv; in fact the
wife was Fausta, daughter of Maximian). This information is not to be despised, for it appears
that the clergy of Africa suffered when Maximian returned to power in 308, a little before he
made Constantine his son-in-law: see Edwards (1997), 16 and n. 68 on Optatus, Against the
Donatists 1.17.
4 This peak is also mentioned in the Ac/5 of Silvester, though Pohlkamp (1988), 451 n. 142
records numerous variants on the name, including Sarepta. In the Book of Pontijfs the name
appears as Syraptim, and Fuhrmann (1968) also reads Sarepta. As this was the scene of one of
Elijah’s miracles (1 Kgs 17.9), it is possible that the author of the Donation substituted the
biblical name for the one that he found in the Acts of Silvester, and that a later hand corrected
him.
5 As David hid from Saul in 1 Sam. 22.1, and as the prophets hid from Jezebel in 1 Kgs 18.4.
One purpose of this story may be to justify Silvester’s reputation as a saint, which he may have
enjoyed as early as 354 if we accept the (somewhat speculative) reasoning of Pohlkamp (1988),
422 n. 35. In the early church this honour was generally reserved for those who had suffered for
their faith; the Acts of Silvester, which also record this flight, bestow on Silvester the title
confessor, which normally denoted one who had been imprisoned during persecution:
Pohlkamp (1988), 428.
6 The word petrarum, rather than the more classical lapidum, is employed, no doubt
because it echoes the name of Peter (Matt. 16.18). Raymond Davis also notes the caverns of
rock in the Vulgate of Isa. 7.18.
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for the third time,' this leprous condition will leave you. When this has been
accomplished, repay your Saviour for this change of fortune,^ and let all
churches throughout the world be restored by your command. Yourself too
you must purify in this respect, and quitting all idolatrous superstition, and
adore and worship the true and living God, who is both the sole and the true
one, that you may attain to his will.’
8. Therefore I rose from sleep and straightway acted according to the
admonitions that I had received from the apostles. And having summoned
that same pre-eminent^ father and illuminator of ours Silvester, the universal
pope, I told him all the words that the holy apostles had enjoined upon me;
and I asked him, who were these gods Peter and Paul?'' His reply, however,
was that they were not properly called gods, but the apostles of our
Saviour, the Lord God Jesus Christ. And again we began to inquire of the
same most blessed pope, whether he had an engraved portrait^ of these
apostles of his, so that we might learn from the picture that these were the
ones of whom I had learned by revelation. Then the same reverend father
bade that portraits of the same apostles should be displayed by his deacon;®
and when I beheld them, and perceived that the faces that I had seen in
sleep had been delineated in these very portraits, I testified with a great cry
1 Because that is the number of immersions required in baptism, in order that each of the
persons in the Trinity may be confessed in turn. Tertullian, Against Praxeas 26 and Hippolytus,
Apostolic Tradition 21, are the earliest witnesses to this stipulation, which, as Wiles (1999)
observes, was generally regarded in the fourth century as a fulfilment of Matt. 28.19 and as a
guarantee of orthodoxy against the Arians. Naaman, by contrast, bathed himself seven times (2
Kgs 5.14).
2 As the leper healed by Jesus was required to present his gift of thanks to God: Mark 1.43.
3 Mirbt and Aland (1967), 254 and Fuhrmann (1968), 73 add almificus (‘benevolent’).
4 A similar error was made by those who worshipped Paul and Baimabas at Lystra (Acts
14.12-15).
5 It was not in fact impossible that such pictures should be displayed in the early fourth
century, as Eusebius, Church History 7.18.4 was not ashamed to have seen them in Palestine.
The author has thus avoided a rank anachronism, though his purpose here is to rout the
iconoclasts of his day. See my introduction on controversy between the Byzantine emperors
and the pontiffs of the eighth century.
6 For the parallel in the Ac?.? of Silvester see Pohlkamp (1988), 452 n. 144. See LP 1,499.27
for Hadrian Fs representation of Peter’s deliverance from prison; II, 9.29 for Leo Ill’s depiction
of the ‘princes of the apostles’.
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THE EDICT OF CONSTANTINE TO POPE SILVESTER 103
in the midst of all my satraps* that these were the ones that I had seen in
sleep.
9. Thereupon the same most blessed Silvester, our father, bishop of the city
of Rome, set for us a time of penance within our palace, the Lateran,^ in a
single hairshirt of penitence,^ so that we might implore pardon from the
Saviour our Lord God Jesus Christ for all that had been impiously done or
unjustly administered by us, with vigils, fasting, tears also and prayers.
Then, by way of the laying on of hands by the clergy, at last we reached the
prelate himself. And there, renouncing Satan’s mummery'* with his works,
and all idols made with hands, of my own free will in the presence of whole
people I confessed® my belief in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven
and earth, of all things visible and invisible, and in Jesus Christ his only Son
our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.®
1 Valla, Donat. 12.39 (p. 35 Schwahn) is right to mock the use of this term, which for
Constantine could only have denoted the viceroys of the Persian king. It is, however, applied to
rulers of other nations in the Septuagint and hence in the Latin Vulgate (Judg. 3.3 etc.), while in
the LP I, 427.15 Duchesne we read of the satraps of a Lombard king. The scene depicted here
is clearly a Germanic court, in which the king sits with his lords.
2 Pohlkamp (1988), 479 n. 244 observes that most of the edifices which bore the name
palatium in later times remained pagan until the end of the fourth century. Nash (1976)
identifies the building given by Constantine with the domus Faustae in Laterano where a synod
under Miltiades passes judgment on the Carthaginian schism at Optatus, Against the Donatists
1.23. On the archaeology of the building see Pietri (1976), I, 4-11.
3 Penance was the usual prelude to baptism in the ancient church; for the stripping of all
ornaments see Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition 21.5. The cilicium, initially a military garment,
became synonymous with penance because the word is used to render the Greek for ‘sackcloth’
at Luke 10.13.
4 As required, e.g in Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition 21.9.
5 Constantine quotes not the Nicene Creed of 325 (reproduced in the present text of
Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition 21), but a conflation of the opening of this with the early
clauses of a version of the Apostles’ Creed, which was characterized by Kelly (1972), 369 as ‘an
elaborate variant of the Old Roman creed’. Though unknown in the east, this continued to be
‘the CxQQ.d’’ par excellence to Rufinus, Augustine and Leo the Great and the one that became
customary in the rite of baptism. The articles of the Creed were often elicited from the postulant
in the form of a catechism.
6 Mirbt and Aland (1967), 253 and Fuhrmann (1968), 75 omit the word ‘all’ in the previous
clause, and follow the Nicene Creed which states that Christ was bom of the Holy Spirit and the
Virgin Mary. The reading of the Migne text reproduces the Apostles’ Creed, as at Kelly (1972),
369.
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The font' was blessed, and there the water of salvation purified me with a
triple immersion. And when I had been placed in the bosom of the font, I saw
with my own eyes a hand from heaven touching me. And rising from it clean,
I apprehended that I had been cleansed from the whole blight of leprosy. And
once I had been raised from the holy font, and had put on white clothes, he
applied to me the sealing of the sevenfold Holy Spirit^ with the oil of the
blessed chrism, and smeared the banner of the Holy Cross^ on my forehead,
saying, ‘May God seal you with the seal of his faith, in the name of the
Eather and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, in the sealing of faith.’''And the
whole clergy replied ‘Amen’; then the prelate added, ‘Peace be with you’.
10. And thus on the first day after I had received the mystery of holy
baptism, and after my body had been cured of the blight of leprosy, I appre¬
hended that there was no other god but the Eather, the Son and the Holy
Spirit, whom blessed Silvester the pope proclaims, the Trinity in unity and
unity in Trinity. Eor all the gods of the nations, whom I have worshipped up
to this time, are clearly proved to be daemons, the work of human hands.^
And furthermore, the reverend father explained to us most clearly what
measure of power in heaven and earth that same Saviour of ours had
conferred on his apostle the blessed Peter, when, finding that he showed
faith in answering his question, he said, ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock
I shall build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it’.®
1 Not described either here or in the Acts of Silvester; the artefact of porphyry and precious
metals described in the Book of Pontiffs was in fact the construction of Xystus III, according to
Duchesne at LP I, 192. On the ancient baptistei'y see Pietri (1976) I, 11-14.
2 The seven gifts of the Spirit, according to the Septuagintal version of Isa. 11.2, are
wisdom, insight, counsel, might, knowledge, fear and piety. This figure is already quoted by
Augustine, Sermon on the Mount 1.4.11 but the ‘sevenfold grace’ almost certainly found its way
into this document through the Gelasian Sacramentary, which enumerates all of them at the end
of the baptismal liturgy. See Wilson (1894), 87 and Finn (1992), 106.
3 See Lampe (1951), 260-83 on the conjunction of anointing in the Spirit with the sign of
the Cross, on the relative importance of the two ceremonies, and on the possibility that
Christians in the patristic era wore a visible sign of the cross upon their foreheads.
4 The rite of confirmation, which then followed immediately on baptism, as at Hippolytus,
Apostolic Tradition 22. On the seal of faith ifides signata) see Tertullian, On Baptism 6.
5 Two different understandings of the idol, but both attested e.g. by Paul at 1 Cor. 8.4-10
and 10.20-21.
6 Matt. 16.18 — a text which, as it came to be the cornerstone of Rome’s claim to
ecclesiastical primacy, ensured that Peter would overshadow Paul in her recollection. Ullmann
(1960), 31 n. 2 remarks upon the ‘scarcity of references to Matt. 16.18ff’ in early asseverations
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Take note, ye powerful, and attend with the ears of your heart, what the good
master and Lord added, saying to his disciple, ‘Whatever you have bound on
earth shall be bound also in heaven’.^ A marvellous thing indeed is this and
a glorious one, to bind and loose on earth and have it bound and loosed in
heaven.
11. And inasmuch as, learning these things from the preaching of the blessed
Silvester, I also found that by the beneficence of the same blessed Peter I had
been restored to perfect health:^
We have deemed it expedient, in company with all our satraps and the whole
senate,^ of my nobles'* also, and furthermore the whole Roman populace
which is subject to our imperial glory, that just as Saint Peter is seen^ to have
of papal primacy; he argues (33ff.) that Leo I was the first pope who laid claim to a ‘juridical
succession’ from Peter, although Damasus had styled himself the heir of the apostle, and some
notion of succession was already on the lips of Stephen I in the mid-third century, to judge by
Firmilian in Cyprian, Letter 75.
1 Matt. 16.19, though part of this promise is also vouchsafed to the other apostles at Matt.
18.18 as well as at John 20.23. The previous and succeeding clauses of the verse from Matthew
appear in Mirbt and Aland (1967), 253 and in Fuhrmann (1968), 79.
2 Note c at Migne (1844), 573-74 indicates that in some versions the edict commences with
a summary of the preceding narrative.
3 The ruling body of Rome in the republican era, the right of participation being conferred
by the censors with regard to property and the tenure of lower magistracies (especially that of
quaestor). Although its powers became largely nominal under the later Empire, its members
retained their hereditary wealth and local influence, and years continued to be dated by the
names of its two leading magistrates or consuls, even when neither of these was the emperor. In
this text, however, the term denotes an assembly of princes and nobles on the Germanic model,
the Roman institution having become extinct in the late sixth century: see Stein (1968).
4 The word is optimates, which, as Cicero, In Defence ofSestius 97-100 explains, was used
of men who entered politics for the good of the state and not for their own aggrandizement, and
who therefore maintained the dignity of the ancient constitution even when this gave offence to
a venal and ignorant populace. As Valla, Donat. 12.40 (p. 35 Schwahn) notes, the use of the
term to signify the nobility is not classical, but it appears in the Book of Pontiffs as a name for
the acolytes of German kings and of the popes whom they protected: LP II, 406.5, 427.17
Duchesne etc. It also appears as a term for military officers in the decree of Pope Stephen II at
Mirbt and Aland (1967), 115.5.
5 The word videtur (‘seems, is seen’) is here employed redundantly for ‘is’, as is sometimes
the case in classical Latin. I have rendered it fully here to convey the pompous tone of the
decree, but the reader should remember that the pleonasm is more obtrusive in English than in
Latin.
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been established as the vicegerent of the Son of God on earth, so the pontiffs
also who are vicegerents to this chief of the apostles, should receive by a
grant from us and our dominion a power of primacy greater than the
mildness of our imperial Serenity is seen to possess on earth; thus we choose
this same chief and his vicegerents to be our steadfast advocates with God.
And, as is the case with our imperial power on earth, so we have decreed that
his sacred church in Rome is to be honoured with reverence, and that to a
greater degree than our dominion and earthly throne the most sacred chair of
the blessed Peter is to be exalted in glory; thus we assign to him power and
glory, imperial in dignity, strength and honour.
12. And in this decree we ordain that he should possess a primacy above the
four pre-eminent sees' of Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople^ and Jemsalem,^
which he is likewise to have over all the churches of God throughout the
whole world. As for him who before this time has been the pontiff of the
sacred Roman Church, he is to be raised higher'' to become head^ of all
priests in the entire world, and all that needs to be provided for the worship
of God or the preservation of the faith of Christians is to be administered as
he judges fit. Just it is indeed, that the place which supplies a head for the
primacy of the sacred law should also be the place where the author of the
sacred laws, our Saviour, bade the blessed Peter secure the seat of his
apostolate. Here too it was that, bearing a capital penalty on the Cross, he
1 Although its bishop bore the title of pope in the time of Cyprian (251-258) Carthage was
never recognized as a major see at ecumenical councils, and in any case the province was under
Moslem mle when this text was composed. The proem to Justinian, Novella 109 enumerates the
same patriarchates, except that Antioch is styled Theopolis.
2 Valla, Donat. 13.44 (p. 39 Schwahn) sneers at the presence of Constantinople here,
because, as the document itself goes on to indicate, the city was not yet founded. Yet even the
signatories to the Nicene Creed of 325 include the future president of the see, although it did not
come into being until 330 (Gelasius of Cyzicus, Church History 2.28.13). The dignity of the
bishopric was pronounced to be second only to that of Rome in the third decree of the council
held there in 381; both here and in canon 28 of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, it was implied
that political status was the measure of ecclesiastical eminence.
3 An anachronism, as Jerusalem became independent of Caesarea, its nominal metropolis,
only at the council of Chalcedon in 451: see Bright (1882), 24.
4 As Pohlkamp (1988), 476 n. 235 observes, the first authentic edict to confirm the papal
primacy throughout the Empire was that of Valentinian III in 445 AD, though in 378 Gratian
had already extended the pontiff’s jurisdiction beyond Italy and Illyricum (Croatia) to Africa,
Britain and Gaul.
5 The name Cephas (1 Cor. 15.5 etc.) is traced here, by a false though common etymology,
to the Greek word kephale (head). Cf. Optatus, Donatists 2.2, with Edwards (1997), 32 n. 9.
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THE EDICT OF CONSTANTINE TO POPE SILVESTER 107
drank the cup of a blessed death,' and proved to be an imitator^ of his own
Master and Lord. And let the nations bow their necks in confessing the name
of Jesus Christ in the place where their teacher, the blessed apostle Paul,
stretched forth his neck for Christ and was crowned with martyrdom.^ Here
to the end of time let them seek a teacher, where the teacher’s holy body is at
rest; and here, prostrate and humbled, let them minister in the service of the
heavenly king, our God and Saviour Jesus Christ, where they were servants
to the proud dominion of an earthly king.
13 . In the meantime we desire the whole population of every race and
nation throughout the earth to know that within our Lateran Palace,to that
same Lord God Jesus Christ our Saviour, we have built from the founda¬
tions a church^ along with a baptistery;® and as to its foundations, know ye
also that on our own shoulders we have carried extremely heavy baskets^
of earth, equal to the number of the twelve apostles. This sacred church, as
we determine, is to be named, honoured, venerated and proclaimed as the
head and summit of all the churches throughout the whole world, just as we
have determined through our other imperial decrees.® We have also built
1 For the metaphor cf. Matt. 20.23, 26.39 and parallels. For the crucifixion of Peter see Acts
of Peter 38 at Elliot (1993), 425; at 392 Elliot assigns a second-century date to the Greek
original.
2 As Christians are exhorted to be at John 13.14—15 etc.
3 On the beheading of Paul see Acts of Paul 11.5 at Elliot (1993), 387. At 356, Elliot cites
Tertullian, On Baptism 17 and Origen, First Principles 1.2.3 to support a dating of the original
text to the second century.
4 It is generally agreed that this was the house of Eausta mentioned in Optatus, Against the
Donatists 1.23 as the scene of the Roman council against the Donatists under Silvester’s
predecessor Miltiades. Despite the doubts of Nash (1976), it is also widely believed that this
Fausta was the daughter of Maximian and the wife of Constantine; if the author knows of this
tradition, he has good reason to style the edifice a palace.
5 No such gift is attested in the Ac/.? of Silvester, according to Pohlkamp (1988), 479 n. 244,
although this text reports that after the inspection of the Lateran, Constantine pronounced that
any pauper who became Christian would be clothed in royal vestments: Pohlkamp (1988), 482
n. 252.
6 Pohlkamp (1988), 480 n. 246 holds that the two great churches had distinct functions in
late antiquity: the Lateran for baptism, the basilica of St Peter for the reconciliation of the
lapsed.
7 An allusion, as Raymond Davis reminds me, to Matt. 14.20. The twelve baskets that were
taken up after the feeding of the 5000 are here taken to represent the twelve apostles.
8 Huyghebaert (1979) and Pohlkamp (1988), 438-39 adduce this passage as evidence that
one purpose of the Donatioti was to hallow both ends of the route from St Peter’s to the Lateran,
which was trodden by pilgrims in the Middle Ages.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
churches^ of the blessed Peter and Paul, the first of the apostles, and these
we have adorned with gold and silver, and there with great honour we have
also interred their most sacred bodies and have built resting-places for the
same from electrum^ (which yields in strength to none of the elements),
and a cross of the finest gold with most precious gems in their respective
resting-places, fastening them with golden studs. To furnish lights for these
churches, we have conferred on them the estates of our possessions, we
have enriched them with divers things, and through our sacred imperial
command we have granted them through our munificence, both in the east
and in the west, no less in the northern and in the southern zones, that is to
say in Judaea, Greece, Asia, Thrace, Africa and Italy,^ along with the divers
islands, always on the understanding that all is to be administered through
the hands of our most blessed father'* Silvester the pontiff and of his
successors.
14 . Together with us therefore let the whole populace^ rejoice, and the
nations of races in all the lands of the world, and in our exhortation we bid
1 At LP I, 176.1-5 Duchesne we read that the Church of St Peter superseded a temple of
Apollo, while at 178.12-15 the Church of Paul is said to have been built at Silvester’s request.
The number of churches attributed to Constantine and his contemporaries grew with the
passage of the years: see Duchesne, LP I, 193-201 and Davis (1989), xix-xxvi on those
attributed to him in the Book ofPontijfs. While few of these in their present form can be dated
to the fourth century, Davis is of the opinion that many may originate as conversions of vacant
property in the reign of Constantine. For St Peter’s and St Paul’s without the walls see Davis,
xxi-xxii, where he admits that the second ‘causes problems’ and that the first cannot have
received its endowment before 324, whereas he traces the Lateran church to 313 (see below).
2 Acompound of gold and silver, according to Pliny the Elder, Natural History 9.139,33.81
and 36.46. In these passages Pliny comments on its luminosity and its suitability for regal
ornament.
3 Many of the provinces ruled by Constantine go unnamed here, including Gaul and Britain.
All the named regions lay within the Byzantine Empire at its maximum extent, and thus the
purpose of the document seems to be to make it cleai* that the popes have sovereignty, or at least
the right to sovereignty, in this area without compromising the jurisdiction of the Frankish
kings.
4 Cf. Philemon 10 and Gal. 4.19 for the notion that the one who converts another is his
spiritual father.
5 The word populus seems to be used here, as elsewhere in the Donation, for those who
regarded themselves as the Roman people, as distinct from the subject nations. After the
constitutio Antoniniana of 215, which declared all freeborn persons in the Empire to be
citizens, the difference, when alleged at all, was nominal. The text may contain a trace of the use
of populus in the Acts of Silvester to denote the whole Christian laity: Pohlkamp (1988), 482 n.
252.
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THE EDICT OF CONSTANTINE TO POPE SILVESTER 109
everyone give thanks without measure along with us to our God and
Saviour' Jesus Christ, seeing that God himself in the heavens above, and in
the earth beneath, visiting us through his own apostles has deemed us
worthy to receive the sacred sacrament of baptism and health of body.^ On
this account we grant and at the present time hand over to those same holy
apostles, my blessed lords Peter and Paul, and through them also to the
blessed Silvester our father, the supreme pontiff and universal pope^ of the
city of Rome, and to all the pontiffs who shall be his successors and sit in the
chair of the blessed Peter up to the end of the world, the palace of our
dominion, the Lateran,^ which is set above and excels all other palaces in all
the lands of the world; and after that the diadem, that is the crown of our
head,^ and the Phrygian cap, that is the mitre,® not omitting the shoulder-
piece, that is the collar which is wont to surround the imperial neck; and
furthermore the purple mantle’ and russet tunic,^ and all the imperial
1 Cf. Tit. 2.13, though it is not clear from the Greek of that verse whether God and Christ the
Saviour are a single subject.
2 Though Dolger (1913), 407 finds it remarkable that such an effect should be ascribed to
baptism, Heb. 10.22 insists on the lustration of the body, while 1 Cor. 11.30 ascribes disease and
death to the abuse of the eucharist.
3 The Latin rival to the Greek term ‘ecumenical patriarch’, as again in Chapter 17.
4 Often called simply the Constantinian basilica in the Book of Pontiffs, this is now the
Church of S. Giovanni in Laterano. Davis (1989), xx opines that it was the earliest of all
Constantine’s ecclesiastical foundations. Pohlkamp (1988), 484 n. 258 finds a derisive echo in
the mention of E\agaba\us' palatiurn at Augustan History, Elagabalus 3.4
5 Mommsen (1996), 375 cites Epitome on the Caesars 41.1 to show that this item of
headgear, hitherto reserved for women and deities, was introduced by Constantine himself to
the royal wardrobe. On the diadem as an ornament of the Virgin in statuary, see LP II, 418.2
Duchesne
6 This clause is omitted as an editorial gloss in Mirbt and Aland (1967), 256 and in
Fuhrmann (1968), 87. The word mitra in classical Latin denotes only a female ornament, or the
affectation of an effeminate man. In Greek it has a wider and nobler range of senses, and its
presence here would therefore be an argument for the Greek provenance of the text, were it not
that the mitra appears in the Vulgate (Exod. 29.9) as an indispensable covering for the
priesthood, and is even worn by monarchs in conjunction with a crown (Ecclus. 45.14; Zech.
6.11). The adjective ‘mitred’ (mitratum) is applied to the pope in the Book of Pontiffs, but only
in the reign of Leo IX: LP II, 355.12 Duchesne. Ullmann (1958), 259 and 313 contends that
even when the mitre was used for the coronation of a secular ruler in Ordo C of the Holy Roman
Empire, it remained indistinguishable from the papal mitre of this epoch.
7 For the word chlamys cf. the Acts of Silvester at Pohlkamp (1988), 479 n. 245.
8 Valla, Donat. 16.52 (p. 46 Schwahn) mocks the apparent duplication of the costume, but
he forgets that at Einhard, Life of Charlemagne 23 the emperor wore both chlamys and tunica,
together with calceamenta and a diadema to honour the pontiffs Hadrian I and Leo III. See my
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
vestments;^ and therewith too the honour of imperial horsemen for his
retinue;^ and with these we confer also the imperial sceptres, together with
all the insignia,^ the banners also and the divers imperial ornaments, the
whole pageantry of the imperial eminence and the glory of our power.
15 . As for the most reverend'^ men of the clergy who minister to that same
sacred Roman church in their divers orders, we determine that they shall
have, in its unparalleled power and precedence, that eminence whose glory
is seen to bring honour to our most illustrious senate; that is, we proclaim
that they are to be made patricians^ and consuls,® and no less are they to be
decorated with the other imperial dignities. And just as the imperial army’
has its ornaments, so also we determine that the clergy of the sacred church
of Rome shall have its ornaments; and just as the imperial power is adorned
introduction on the advantages that each of the parties reached from mutual deference; but note
also that both Einhard and the Donation (though the purpose of the allusion remains obscure)
appear to have in mind an attested variant of Matt. 27.28 which gives an equally tautological
description of the purple robe of Christ.
1 At the corresponding point in the Acts of Silvester, Constantine divests himself of the
'albs’: see Duchesne, LP I, cxii.
2 Following Pullan (1971), 10, except that I avoid the translation ‘knights’ because in
classical usage this denotes citizens whose rank entitled them to administrative appointments.
In this passage, of course, the mediaeval sense of eques (a man entitled to ride a horse in the
service of his overlord) is assumed.
3 Reading cuncta insignia, with Migne. Mirbt and Aland (1967), 256 and Fuhrmann (1968),
88 have conta et insignia.
4 The reading reverendissimis makes more sense than the reverentissimis in Fuhrmann
(1968). On the rule of preferring the difficilior lectio, this makes Fuhrmann’s text superior,
though I translate Migne here as everywhere else.
5 Under the republic, ‘patrician’ was a hereditary designation for those families which in
ancient times had furnished all the members of the Senate. Constantine revived it as a title of
distinction for those senators who had been advanced to the rank below that of consul: Jones
(1964), II, 528. In the Carolingian period a patrician was often the steward of a particular
territory or population; Ullmann (1958), 73 observes that Pepin had been granted the title
‘patrician of the Romans’ by the Roman see, which scrupled to acknowledge him as emperor.
6 The two officers elected annually to lead the armies of the Republic, and who even under
the Empire continued to give their names to the year. Though Constantine was not so
accustomed as his predecessors to take this title for himself, he certainly never granted it to a
pope. See note at end on clarissimus.
1 Enlarging on the analogy between soldiering and faith that is already adumbrated at 1 Cor.
9.7, Eph. 6.11 etc. See also Tertullian, Prescription of Heretics 40 on the brand of Mithras, the
soldier’s god, which he sees as a parody of the Christian sealing with the Spirit. See also
Augustine, Sermon to Catechumens 16 on the indelible brand of the Christian legionary.
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THE EDICT OF CONSTANTINE TO POPE SILVESTER 111
with divers offices, namely those of the chamberlains,^ the doorkeepers and
all the domestic guards, so too we wish the sacred church of Rome to be
decorated. And, in order that the glory of the pontiff may shine with the
utmost splendour, this too we determine, that the horses of the clergy of that
same sacred church of Rome are to be decorated with cloths and linen of the
most brilliant hue,^ and thus they are to ride. And just as our Senate wears
shoes^ with felt, shining with the most brilliant linen,^ so too is the clergy to
wear them, and thus are earthly things like heavenly ones to be decorated in
praise of God.^ Before all else, we assign this freedom to that same most
holy father of ours Silvester, the bishop and pope of the city of Rome, and
to all the most blessed pontiffs who shall stand in his succession for ever¬
lasting ages, for the honour of Christ our God, in that same catholic and
apostolic® church of God; that by our express command,^ if at his own will
and pleasure he wishes to make someone a cleric* and to count him among
1 The cubicularius was the head of the servants in the imperial household, at least since the
late first century (Suetonius, Domitian 17).
2 Cf. the equestrian spectacle described at LP I, 390.14-15 Duchesne.
3 The word is calceamenta rather than the more usual calcei of classical times (see next
note), no doubt because the Vulgate ordains the calceamentum as the clerical shoe at Exod.
12.11 and makes the Baptist apply this term to the footwear of Christ at Mai'k 1.7 and parallels.
It may be that Constantine was famous for his ostentatious footwear, since in the Augustan
History, which professes to be written in his reign and is now generally suspected of satirical
intent, the calceamentum is described as the mark of royalty {Maximin 28.8), and the jewelled
calceamenta of Elagabalus (a mock Constantine in the view of many scholars) are singled out
for mention at Elagabalus 4.4 and 23.4. On the possibility that our author was in possession of
sources lost to us, see note above on the title Alamannicus.
4 Commenting on Cicero, Philippics 13.28, Shackleton-Bailey (1986), 343 n. 42 states that
senators wore boots {calcei) with an ivory crescent at the tip. The consul Ausonius, Daily Round
2.1 bids a servant bring him his calcei and linen. White was a mark of senators in congress, as
Theodosian Code 14.10.1 indicates by styling them the white order and making this attire
compulsoiy.
5 CfHeb. 8.5 and Exod. 25.40.
6 A coupling which is found first in the eighth canon of Nicaea at Jonkers (1954), 42, then
in the fourth-century creeds of Epiphanius and the Council of Constantinople (381): see
Heurtley (1911), 18 and 22. Kelly (1972), 187 reads it also in the so-called Apostolical
Constitutions 7.41
7 Translating the indicto of Migne, rather than the synclitu of Mirbt and Aland (1967), 257,
which would appear to be a transcription of the Greek word for the Senate.
8 Reading clericare for clericali, with Migne note c. Even so, the syntax is disordered, and
the last clause may contain an accusative absolute, though this would have been ungrammatical
in Latin and hardly more felicitous in Greek.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
the number of the clergy in religion, no-one at all shall presume to act
contumaciously.'
16 . Herewith we have determined this also, that this same venerable father
of ours Silvester the supreme pontiff, and all the pontiffs who succeed him,
are to wear the diadem (that is the crown that we have granted him from our
own head) made of gold and precious gems, and is to bear it on his head for
the praise of God and the honour of the blessed Peter. Yet seeing that the
most blessed pope himself refuses absolutely^ to wear that golden crown on
top of the crown of his clerical office, which he wears in honour of the
blessed Peter: we with our own hands have placed upon his most sacred head
the Phrygian^ cap with its brilliant glow which symbolizes the splendid
resurrection of our Lord;'^ and, holding the rein of his horse, out of reverence
for the blessed Peter, we have shown him the office of a squire,^ and have
ordained that in processions all his successors are to enjoy sole use of that
same Phrygian cap, in imitation of our dominion.®
17 . Hence, in order that the pontifical majesty may not grow cheap, but may
also be decorated with the power of glory,’ and more richly than the dignity
1 Throughout the Middle Ages the popes contested the right of investiture both with lay
powers and with other ecclesiastical dignitaries. For this period it may be relevant to notice the
(alleged) decree of Hadrian I which appears at Hinschius (1863), 689, and asserts his right to
appoint new prelates in Britain against the will of the incumbents.
2 Ullmann (1965), 61 writes: ‘The forger’s intention was to convey the idea that, since no-
one had ever doubted that Constantine did wear a crown after reaching Constantinople, he wore
it with the pope’s agreement and acquiescence’. Verisimilitude may also have been a
consideration: it was surely well known that pontiffs of the fourth century had affected a
simplicity which in the eighth was thought to be unbecoming to the office.
3 Called the mitre above, and made from peacock feathers, according to the note at Migne
(1844), 576 note e. Ullmann (1958), 312-13 identifies this with the camelaucum of LP I,
390.15 Duchesne, and deduces that until the eleventh century the popes wore only one piece of
headgear. Eichmann (1951), 29-30 argues from the same evidence that two were worn.
Although the noun Phrygium/Frigium does not occur in the Book of Pontiff's, one may compare
the word tyrea (from Tyre) for purple cloths at LP I, 504.14ff.
4 For the association of light with the resurrection cf. Eph. 5.14.
5 See Huyghebaert (1979), 186 on the integrity of this passage, which recalls the prostration
of Pepin before the pope in 754 (see introduction).
6 I follow here the punctuation of Migne, though, as Raymond Davis remarks to me, rulers
did not wear the mitra, and Mirbt and Aland (1967), 257 therefore take this phrase with the
following paragraph.
7 A pleonastic phrase, which may recall the conclusion of the Lord’s Prayer as commonly
recited in catholic churches (first attested at Didache 9.2).
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THE EDICT OF CONSTANTINE TO POPE SILVESTER 113
of earthly dominion: behold, not only our palace, as was previously stated,
but also the city of Rome and all the provinces of the whole of Italy and the
western regions, their districts and cities, we grant and relinquish to that
aforesaid pontiff of ours Silvester the universal pope; these, as we determine
with our steadfast imperial judgment through this solemn' and pragmatic^
constitution of ours, are to be administered by his power and authority and
that of the pontiffs who shall succeed him, and we grant that they shall
remain under the jurisdiction of the sacred church of Rome.
18 . Hence we have also perceived it to be fitting that our dominion and
imperial power should be transferred and changed to the regions of the east,
in the best site in the province of Byzantium,^ a city is to built in our name,^
and our dominion is to be established there; the reason is that it is not just for
the earthly emperor to hold power in the place where the primacy among
priests and the headship of the Christian religion have been established by
the heavenly emperor.^
19 . All these things we have ordained and ratified through other solemn
decrees, and we determine that they are to remain undiminished and
unbroken until the end of the world. Wherefore in the presence of the living
1 The word divalia meant ‘divine’ in early Latin usage, but became almost obsolete until it
was rescued for jurisprudence by Justinian, Digest 5.9 etc. At this point its meaning was
‘sanctioned by God’. It occurs at LP I, 350.4, 354.16, 363.12, 366.9 and 368.17 Duchesne to
denote the imperial letters received by the pope at his installation. In the first three instances the
emperor is Constantine, but the ceremony of letters is not recorded in those lives which show
the popes at loggerheads with the eastern throne. There is a clue to date, if not to authorship, in
the fact (pointed out to me by Raymond Davis) that all uses of divalia in the Book of Pontiffs
occur in lives 81-85, all of which are thought, on other grounds, to have been composed by the
same eighth-centuiy contributor.
2 A legal term for the ordinances of kings, unknown to the Book of Pontiffs, but already
made cun'ent by Justinian, Digest 15.1 proem and Theodosian Code 11.1.36, 16.5.32.
3 As Valla, Donat. 19.62 (p. 55 Schwahn) points out, no such province existed, Byzantium
being merely a city.
4 Constantinople was dedicated in 324, and was established in 330 as the seat of govern¬
ment for the richer half of the Empire, becoming the sole capital after the fall of the western
realm in 476.
5 Therefore, though Byzantium has supplanted Rome, it cannot overshadow the papacy, and
the pontiffs of the eighth century were right to defy the iconoclastic rulers of the east in matters
spiritual even while they remained their loyal subjects in matters temporal. See my introduction
on the historical circumstances of the forgery.
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CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
God/ and in the presence of his terrible judgment, we through this imperial
constitution of ours adjure all the emperors who shall succeed us, and all our
nobles and satraps, with the most illustrious senate and the whole population
in all the lands of the world which is subject to us both now and in all ages to
come, that in no way is it permitted to any of them, to break, infringe or in
any way violate these grants which are made with our imperial sanction to
the sacred church of Rome or to all its pontiffs. But if anyone (as we do not
believe will happen), should prove to be so audacious or so overweening, let
him be bound in subjection to eternal torments, and let him be aware that the
holy chiefs^ of the apostles, Peter and Paul, are his adversaries in this life and
the next; and may he fall into consuming fire with the devil and all the
impious in the lowest depths of hell.^
20 . The page of this imperial decree of ours we have confirmed with our
own hands, and have placed it upon the venerable body of the blessed Peter,''
chief of the apostles, making a promise there to the same apostle of God that
we shall preserve all these gifts without violation and leave to the emperors
who succeed us a command that they are to be preserved, and we hand them
over as an everlasting and happy possession to our blessed father Silvester,
the supreme pontiff and universal pope, together with all the pontiffs^ who
shall succeed him, with the assent of the Lord God and our Saviour Jesus
Christ.
1 Cf. Heb. 10.31 on the terror of falling into the hands of the living God.
2 The word is principes (singular: princeps), again perhaps punning on the likeness of the
Greek word kephale to Cephas, the original name of Peter; cf. Leo I, Letter 10.1. The formula
principes apostolorum is frequent in the Book of Pontiffs, e.g. at II, 9.29 Duchesne (pontificate
of Leo III).
3 Cf. Matt. 25.41, though ‘Constantine’ adds fallen mortals to the angelic rout.
4 Cf. LP I, 498.27, where Etherius lays Charlemagne’s donation on the body of St Peter.
‘Trophies’ or memorials of Paul and Peter were known to a certain Gaius in the second century
(Eusebius, Church History 2.25.7), and there is archaeological evidence that a monument was
built by the catacombs on the Appian Way between 238 and 260: Chadwick (1957), 32. He
notes (34-36) that the inscription of Damasus which records the translation of the apostles’
relics to the Vatican is calculated to show that the ‘Arian’ east has lost its right to these Greek
figures. He argues against Duchesne, LP I, civ-cvii, who maintains that an original deposition
in the Vatican preceded the brief secretion of the relics on the Via Appia, and that these were
returned to the Vatican under Constantine.
5 The words per eum (‘through him’), which appear in Mirbt and Aland (1967), 258 and
Fuhrmann (1968), 99, are not found in Migne.
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THE EDICT OF CONSTANTINE TO POPE SILVESTER 115
And the imperial signature; May the Divinity^ preserve you through
many years, most holy and blessed fathers. Given at Rome, on the third day
before the April Kalends,^ the consuls being our lord Flavius Constantine
Augustus for the fourth time^ and Gallicanus,'* both men of exalted rank.^
1 A fine stroke of verisimilitude: see L.J. Hall (1998) and my note to Oration 23.
2 That is 30 March, the Kalends being the first day and the reckoning inclusive.
3 In fact, as the edition of Migne (1844), 578 observes, the partner of Constantine in his
fourth consulship (the year 315) was Licinius. The dating is of the standard form that can be
found, for example, at the end of the genuine letter of Marcian after the Chalcedonian Council
of 451: Hinschius (1863), 288.
4 Two Gallicani are attested as consuls, Ovinius with Bassus in 317, and Flavius with
Symmachus in 330 (cf. Theodosian Code 16.2.7). The first is believed by Barnes (1982), 95 and
10In, and by Jones et al. (1971), 383 to be Constantine’s co-benefactor commemorated at LP
I, 184.14 Duchesne. The second is often presumed to have been the one who was remembered as
a saint; but Champlin (1982) contends that this is nothing but an inference from his date, and
suggests that Ovinius is the one intended because the actions of a character of the same name in
Augustan History, Elagabalus 48.1-6 can be read as a parody of his benefactions. In any case
the shared consulship of Constantine and Gallicanus is imaginary. The author of the Donation
no doubt assumed the identity of the saint and the benefactor, and 330 is perhaps the date
implied, as this was also the year of Constantine’s migration to the east.
5 The Latin vir clarissimus denoted in classical times a man with the right to bear the rank
of consul, but from the late first century it was extended to everyone who was qualified to be a
senator. While both the term and the consular rank were more widely distributed under the later
Empire, it was still impossible to hold the consulship without being clarissimus: Jones (1964)
II, 527-28.
Constantine_05_
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Constantine 05
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Classical literature. With the exceptions listed in the Primary Sources, these
authors (Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Herodotus, Thucydides, Antiphon, Plato,
Theocritus, Cicero, Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Strabo, Seneca, Lucan,
Pliny the Elder, Suetonius, Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom, Apuleius, Lucian,
Diogenes Laertius, Philostratus, Plotinus, Julian, Ammianus Marcellinus,
Nonnus) can be consulted in bilingual editions published by William
Heinemann in the Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA).
Christian literature. Apocryphal Christian gospels should be consulted in
Elliot (1993), and Nag Hammadi texts in Robinson (1988). All Greek and
Latin patristic literature, with the exception of works discovered after about
1830, is contained in the Patmlogia Latina and Patrologia Graeca, com¬
piled by J.-P. Migne (Paris). Many have been re-edited since in such series as
Sources Chretiennes (SC, Paris), Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latin-
orum (CSEL, Vienna/Leipzig/Prague), Corpus Christianorum Scriptorum
Latinorum (CCSL, Turnhout) and Griechische Christliche Schriftsteller
(GCS, Berlin/Leipzig). Bilingual editions of the following are available in
the Loeb Classical Library; Ignatius {unAei Apostolic Fathers), Clement of
Alexandria {Protrepticus, Schoolmaster, Rich Man’s Salvation)', Tertullian
(On Spectacles, Apology)', Minucius Felix; Eusebius (Church History)', Basil
(letters and essay on reading Greek literature); Jerome (letters); Augustine
(letters. City of God and Confessions)', Prudentius.
With the exceptions listed in the Primary Sources, translations of ecclesi¬
astical writers can be consulted in the Library of the Ante-Nicene Fathers,
and the Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, published in the
nineteenth century by T. and T. Clark (Edinburgh) and republished frequently
in the twentieth century by W. Eerdmans (Grand Rapids). Ante-Nicene
Fathers (ANF) include Didache (with Ignatius etc.), Ignatius, Justin Martyr,
Athenagoras, Tatian, Minucius Felix, Theophilus of Antioch, Irenaeus,
Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Origen, Cyprian, Novatian,
Methodius, Lactantius, Arnobius. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (NPNF)
include Eusebius, Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus,
Constantine_06_Biblio
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118
CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
John Chrysostom, Ephraem Syrus, Ambrose, Cyril of Alexandria, Rufinus,
Jerome, Augustine, Socrates, Sozomen, Philostorgius, Theodoret.
Jewish writings. Canonical and Deuterocanonical texts (the latter including
Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Greek portions of Daniel) are best consulted in the
bilingual edition of the Septuagint by L.C.L. Brenton (London, 1851, often
reprinted). Pseudepigraphic texts {lEnoch, 2Enoch, Sibylline Oracles,
Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs) should be consulted in H.F.D. Sparks,
The Apocryphal Old Testament (Oxford, 1985). Philo and Josephus are
edited with translation in Loeb editions.
Note on titles. The title given first in this list is the one used in the text.
Usually this is an English title, except where a work is so obscure that no
English title has come into common use.
PRIMARY SOURCES
Alcinous, Isagoge, ed. C.F. Hermann, Plato, vol. VI (Leipzig, 1874), 147-
89; trans. with commentary by J. Dillon as The Handbook of Platonism
(Oxford, 1993).
Alexander of Aphrodisias, On Pate, ed. and trans. R.W. Sharpies (London,
1983).
Ambrose of Milan, Letters 16 and 17, ed. with related works of Symmachus
and Prudentius in M. Lavarenne, Prudence III (Paris, 1948). This con¬
tains a French translation; these letters are translated with other relevant
documents in B. Croke and J. Harries (eds), Religious Conflict in Pourth-
Century Rome. A Documentary Study (Sydney, 1982).
Ammianus Marcellinus, Histories, ed. and trans. J.C. Rolfe (Loeb, Cam¬
bridge, MA, 1936-39).
Annals of the Franks, Annales Regni Francorum, ed. G.H. Pertz and F.
Kurze (Hanover, 1895). I am not acquainted with any English translation
of this text.
Arator, Acts of the Apostles, partially edited and translated in R. Hillier,
Arator on the Acts of the Apostles (Oxford, 1993).
Aristides of Athens, Apology, ed. and trans. J. Armitage Robinson (Cam¬
bridge, 1891).
Augustan History, Scriptores Historiae Augusti, ed. and trans. D. Magie
(Loeb, Cambridge, MA, 1922-32).
Aurelius Victor, Caesars, ed. F. Pichlmayr and R. Gruendel (Leipzig, 1966);
Constantine_06_Biblio
118
12/7/02, 11:03
BIBLIOGRAPHY
119
trans. H.W. Bird (Liverpool, 1994).
Book of Pontiffs, Le Liber Pontifkalis, ed. P. Duchesne, vol. I (Paris, 1886),
vol. II (Paris, 1892), supplementary vol. (Paris, 1957). When Duchesne’s
edition is cited, this is regularly abbreviated to LP; otherwise the name
appears in English.
Chalcidius, Commentary on the Timaeus of Plato, ed. J.H. Waszink (Leiden,
1962).
Chaldaean Oracles. Oracles Chaldaiques, ed. with French translation by E.
Des Places (Paris, 1971); trans. R. Majercik (Leiden, 1989).
Clement of Alexandria, Excerpts from Theodotus, ed. and trans. R.P Casey
(Cambridge, 1934).
Collation of Mosaic and Roman Laws, ed. and trans. M. Hyamson (London
and New York, 1913).
Constantine, Oration to the Saints (Orat ). Konstantins Rede an die Hedge
Versammlung, ed. I.A. Heikel, Eusebius Werke 1 (GCS, Leipzig, 1902),
149-92. Previous translation appears in NPNF edition of Eusebius.
Cyril of Alexandria, Select Letters, ed. and trans. L. Wickham (Oxford, 1983).
Donation of Constantine. Edictum Constantini, in J.-P. Migne, Patrologia
Latina 8 (Paris, 1844), 567-79, and Patrologia Latina 130 (Paris, 1853),
245-52. Also as Constitutum Constantini, ed. H. Furhmann, Pontes luris
Germanici Antiqui 10 (Hanover, 1968). Also found in Hinschius (1863),
248-54, Williams (1964) and Mirbt and Aland (1967), 107-12. The edict
without preamble is contained in Valla (Donat.). A partial translation is
supplied by Pullan (1971).
Egeria, Pilgrimage, ed. A. Franceschini and R. Weber (CCSL, Turnholt,
1965); trans. Wilkinson (1971).
Einhard, Life of Charlemagne. Vita Karoli Magni, ed. G.H. Pertz, G. Waitz
and O. Holder-Egger (Hanover and Leipzig, 1911); reprinted with
German translation by E.S. Coleman (Stuttgart, 1968); English
translation by L. Thorpe (Harmondsworth, 1969).
Empedocles. Remains edited in H. Diels, revised by F. Kranz, Fragmente
der Vorsokratiker (Berlin, 1951); partially translated by G.S. Kirk and
J.E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1983).
Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion, ed. K. Holl (GCS, Berlin, 1913-15,
completed 1980); trans. F. Williams (Leiden, 1987-94).
Eusebius, Chronicle. Chronicon, ed. J. Karst (GCS, Leipzig, 1911). I am not
acquainted with any English translation of this text.
-, Church History. Kirchengeschichte, ed. E. Schwartz, 3 vols (GCS,
Berlin, 1903-09). Translated in both NPNF and Loeb editions.
Constantine_06_Biblio
119
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120
CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
-, Gospel Preparation. Praeparatio Evangelica, ed. and trans. E.H.
Gifford, 5 vols (Oxford, 1903).
-, Life of Constantine. Das Leben Constantins, ed. I.A. Heikel,
Eusebius Werke 1 (GCS, Leipzig, 1902), 1-147. F. Winkelmann (ed.),
Eusebios, Uberdas Leben des Kaisers Konstantins (GCS, Berlin, 1975,
revised 1992); for translation and commentary see Cameron and Hall
(1999).
-, Ononiasticon, Theophanie, ed. E. Klostermann (GCS, Leipzig, 1904).
-, Tricennial Oration. Tricennatsrede an Constantin, ed. I.A. Heikel,
Eusebius Werke 1 (GCS, Leipzig, 1902), 193-259; translated by H.A.
Drake, under title In Praise of Constantine (Berkeley, 1976)
Eutropius, Breviary. Breviarium, ed. C. Santini (Stuttgart, 1992); trans.
H.W. Bird (Liverpool, 1993).
Gelasius of Cyzicus, Church History. Kirchengeschichte, ed. G. Loeschke
and M. Heinemann (GCS, Leipzig, 1918). I am not acquainted with an
English translation of this text.
Hilary of Poitiers, On the Mysteries. Trade des Mysteres, ed. with French
translation by J.-P. Brisson (SC, Paris, 1947). I am not acquainted with
any English translation of this text.
Hippolytus of Rome, The Treatise on the Apostolic Tradition, trans. Dix and
Chadwick (1968).
lamblichus of Chalcis, On the Mysteries, ed. with French translation by E.
Des Places (Paris, 1966); English translation by Thomas Taylor (London,
1851, reprinted San Diego, 1994).
-, On the Pythagorean Life, ed. F. Diibner (Leipzig, 1957, 1975); trans.
E.G. Clark (Liverpool, 1989).
Invention of the True Cross, Inventio Sanctae Crucis, ed. A. Holder (Leipzig,
1899).
Jerome, Chronicle. Chronicon, ed. R. Helm (GCS, Berlin, 1956).
-, Commentary on Zechariah, ed. M. Adriaen (CCSL, Turnhout, 1970).
I am not acquainted with an English translation of this text.
Justinian, Digest. Digesta, ed. T. Mommsen and P. Krueger (1905); trans. A.
Watson (Philadelphia, 1985).
Justinian, Novellae, ed. R. Scholl and W. Kroll (Leipzig, 1954).
Lactantius, Divine Institutes (DI). Divinae Institutiones, ed. S. Brandt, 2 vols
(CSEL, Vienna/Leipzig/Prague, 1890-93); translation in ANF edition.
-, On the Deaths of the Persecutors (Pers.), ed. and trans. J.L. Creed
(Oxford, 1984).
Latin Panegyrics. Panegyrici Latini, ed. R.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1964);
.Biblio
120
12/7/02, 11:03
BIBLIOGRAPHY
121
translated as In Praise of Later Roman Emperors by L. Nixon and B.S.
Rodgers (Berkeley and Oxford, 1994).
Leo the Great, Letters, trans. E. Hunt (Washington, DC, 1957); Letter 128 in
W. Bright, Select Sermons of Leo on the Incarnation (London, 1886).
See Migne, Patrologia Latina 54 for full edition of works.
Liber Pontificalis, see Book of Pontiffs.
Mark the Deacon, Life of Porphyry of Gaza. Vie de Porphyre, ed. with French
translation by H. Gregoire and M. Kugener (Paris, 1930). I am not
acquainted with any English translation of this text.
Melito of Sardis, On the Pasch and Fragments, ed. and trans. S.G. Hall
(Oxford, 1979).
Nemesius of Emesa, On the Nature of Man. De Natura Hominis, ed. G.
Verbeke and J. Moncho (Leipzig, 1975); trans.W. Teller (London, 1955).
Numenius of Apamea, Fragments, ed. with French translation by E. Des
Places (Paris, 1973). Excerpts appear in Eusebius, Gospel Preparation.
Optatus of Milevis, Against the Donatists, ed. J. Labrousse (SC, Paris,
1995-96); trans. Edwards (1997).
Origen, Werke, edited by several hands in GCS edition. Translations include:
-, Against Celsus, trans. H. Chadwick (Cambridge, 1953).
-, Commentary on John, 2 vols, trans. R.E. Heine (Washington, DC,
1989, 1993).
-, First Principles, trans. G.W. Butterworth (London, 1936, reprinted
Gloucester, MA, 1973).
-, Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, trans. R.E. Heine (Washington, DC,
1982).
-, On Prayer, trans. R. Greer, Origen (London, 1979).
-, Philokalia, ed. and trans. J. Armitage Robinson (Oxford, 1893).
Passion of Perpetua, ed. and trans. in H. Musurillo, Acts of the Christian
Martyrs (Oxford, 1972).
Paulinus of Nola, Letter 31, can be consulted in appendix to Holder,
Inventio', see further the complete edition of the letters by G. Harkel
(CSEL, Vienna/Leipzig/Prague, 1999); complete translation by P.G.
Walsh (Westminster, MD, and London, 1967).
Philostorgius, Church History. Kirchengeschichte, ed. F. Winkelmann (GCS,
Berlin, 1981); translated with Sozomen by E. Walford (London, 1855).
Porphyry of Tyre, On Abstinence. De Abstinentia, ed. A. Nauck in Porphyrii
Opuscula (Leipzig, 1886); trans. E.G. Clark (London, 2000).
-, Life of Pythagoras. Vita Pythagorae in Nauck (above). I am not
acquainted with any English translation of this text.
Constantine_06_Biblio
121
12/7/02, 11:03
122
CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
-, Sententiae adIntelligibilia Ducentes, ed. E. Lamberz (Leipzig, 1975);
translated as Launching-Points to the Realm of Mind by K. Guthrie
(London, 1989).
-, On Statues, appendix to J. Bidez, Vie de Porphyre (Ghent, 1913);
trans. Gifford as part of Eusebius, Gospel Preparation.
Rufinus, Church Plistory, as supplement to Eusebius, Die Kirchenge-
schichte, ed. E. Schwartz and T. Mommsen (GCS, Berlin, 1908);
translation in NPNE.
Salvian, Letters, in Oeuvres, vol. I, ed. G. Lagarrigue (SC, Paris, 1971); trans.
F. Sullivan in Works of Salvian the Presbyter (Washington, DC, 1962).
Socrates, Church Plistory. Kirchengeschichte, ed. G.C. Hansen (GCS,
Berlin, 1995); translation in NPNE.
Sozomen, Church History. Kirchengeschichte, ed. J. Bidez and G.C. Hansen
(GCS, Berlin, 1995); translation in NPNE.
Stobaeus, Eclogae, ed. O. Wachsmuth and O. Hense (Leipzig, 1884-1923);
no complete translation is available.
Theodore!, Church History. Kirchengeschichte, ed. L. Parmentier, F. Scheid-
weiler and G.C. Hansen (GCS, 3rd edn, Berlin, 1998); translation in
NPNE.
Theodosian Code. Codex Theodosianus, ed. T. Mommsen and P.M. Meyer
(Berlin, 1905); trans. C. Pharr (New York, 1952).
Valla, L., On the Donation of Constantine (Donat.). De Donatione Con-
stantini, ed. W. Schwahn (Leipzig, 1994).
Zonaras, Epitome, ed. B.G. Niebuhr (Bonn, 1841-44).
Zosimus of Panopolis, Treatise on the Omega, with other works and notes, in
W.B. Scott, Hermetica, vol. IV (Oxford, 1936), 104-53.
Zosimus, New History. Nouvelle Histoire, ed. with French translation by F.
Paschoud (Paris, 1971-89); English translation by R.T. Ridley (Canberra,
1982).
SECONDARY LITERATURE AND COMMENTARIES
Aldridge, R.E. (1999), ‘The Two Ways’, Vigiliae Christianae 53, 233-64.
Alfoldi, A. (1948), The Conversion of Constantine and Pagan Rome, trans.
H. Mattingly (Oxford).
Baldwin, B. (1976), ‘Vergilius Graecus’, American Journal of Philology 97,
361-68.
Barnes, T.D. (1973), ‘Lactantius and Constantine’, Journal of Roman
Studies 63, 29-46.
Constantine_06_Biblio
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
123
Barnes, T.D. (1976a), ‘The Emperor Constantine’s Good Friday Sermon’,
Journal of Theological Studies 27, 414-23.
Barnes, T.D. (1976b), ‘Imperial Campaigns, A.D. 285-311’, Phoenix 30,
174-93.
Barnes, T.D. (1976c), ‘The Victories of Constantine’, Zeitschrift fur
Papyrologie und Epigraphik 20, 149-55.
Barnes, T.D. (1981), Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, MA).
Barnes, T.D. (1982), The New Empire of Diocletian and Constantine
(Cambridge, MA).
Barnes, T.D. (1995), ‘Statistics and the Conversion of the Roman Aristo¬
cracy’, Journal of Roman Studies 85, 135-47.
Barnes, T.D. (2001), ‘Constantine’s Speech to the Assembly of the Saints:
Place and Date of Delivery’, Journal of Theological Studies 52, 26-36.
Baynes, N.H. (1931), Constantine the Great and the Christian Church
(London).
Bleckmann, B. (1997), ‘Ein Kaiser als Prediger: Zur datierung der konstantin-
ischen Rede an die Versammlung der Heiligen’, Hermes 125, 183-202.
Bolhuis, A. (1956), ‘Die Rede Konstantins des Grossen an die Versammlung
der Heiligen und Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones’, Vigiliae Christianae
10, 25-32.
Borgehammar, S. (1991), How the Holy Cross was Eound (Stockholm).
Bowersock, G. (1986), ‘From Emperors to Bishops: The Self-Conscious
Transformation of Political Power in the Fourth Century A.D.’, Classical
Philology 81, 298-307.
Bradbury, S. (1996), Severus of Minorca. Letter on the Conversion of the
Jews (Oxford).
Brent, A. (1995), Hippolytus and the Church of Rome at the End of the
Second Century (Leiden).
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Journal of Theological Studies 9, 292-304.
Champlin, E. (1982), ‘Saint Gallicanus (consul 317)’, Phoenix 36, 70-76.
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124
CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
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Constantin et I’oeuvre de Lactance’, in J. Lontane and M. Rerrin (eds),
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Saints’, American Journal of Philology 106, 335-49.
Drake, H.A. (1989), ‘Rolicy and Belief in Constantine’s Oration to the
Saints’, Studia Patristica 19, 43-51.
Drake, H.A. (2000), Constantine and the Bishops. The Politics of Intoler¬
ance (Baltimore).
Drijvers, H. and J.W. (1997), The Finding of the True Cross. The Judas
Kyriakos Legend in Syriac (Louvain).
Drijvers, J.W. (\992), Helena Augusta. The Mother of Constantine the Great
and her Finding of the True Cross (Leiden).
Drijvers, J.W. (1996), ‘The Protonike legend and the Doctrina Addai’,
Studia Patristica 33, 517-23.
Dufraigne, R. (\991), Adventus Augusti, Adventus Christi (Raris).
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and introduction (Liverpool).
Edwards, M.J. (1999a), ‘The Elowering of Latin Apologetic: Lactantius and
Arnohius’, in M.J. Edwards, M.D. Goodman and S.R.E. Price (eds).
Apologetics in the Roman Empire (Oxford), 197-222.
Edwards, M.J. (1999b), ‘The Constantinian Circle and the Oration to the
Saints’, in M.J. Edwards, M.D. Goodman and S.R.E. Price (eds).
Apologetics in the Roman Empire (Oxford), 251-76.
Ehrhardt, C. (1980), ‘“Maximus”, “Invictus” und “Victor” als Datierungs-
kriterien auf Inschriften Konstantins des Grossen’, Zeitschrift fur
Papyrologie unci Epigraphik 49, 177-81.
Eichmann, H. (1951), Die Weihe und Kronung des Papstes im Mittelalter
(Tubingen).
Elliott, T.G. (1992), ‘Constantine’s Explanation of his Career’, Byzantion
62, 212-34.
Elliott, J. (1993), The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford).
Eisner, J. (1998), Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph (Oxford).
Elze, B. (1960), Ordines Coronationum Imperatorum (Pontes luris
Germanic! Antiqui 9) (Hanover).
Encyclopaedia Judaica (EJ), 16 vols (Jerusalem).
Pinn, T.M. (1992), Early Christian Baptism and the Catechumenate. Italy,
North Africa and Egypt (Collegeville, MN).
Polz, R. (1974), The Coronation of Charlemagne, trans. J.E. Anderson
(London).
Powden, G. (1991), ‘Constantine’s Porphyry Column: the Earliest Literary
Allusion’, Journal of Roman Studies 81, 119-31.
Powden, G. (1993), Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Mono¬
theism in Late Antiquity (Princeton).
Powden, G. (1994a), ‘Constantine, Silvester and the Church of S. Poly-
euctus in Constantinople’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 1, 274-84.
Powden, G. (1994b), ‘The Last Days of Constantine: Oppositional Versions
and their Influence’, Journal of Roman Studies 84, 146-70.
Prede, M. (1999), ‘Eusebius’ Apologetic Writings’, in M.J. Edwards, M.D.
Goodman and S.R.E Price (eds), Apologetics in the Roman Empire
(Oxford), 223-50.
Prothingham, A.L. (1883), ‘L’omelia di Giacomo di Serug sul battesimo di
Costantino imperatore’, Atti delle Accademia dei Lincei 8, 167-242.
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Euhrmann, H. (1959), ‘Konstantinisches Schenkung und Silvesterlegende in
neuer Sicht’, Deutscher Archiv fur Erforschung des Mittelalter 15, 523-
40.
Euhrmann (1968), see Donation of Constantine in Primary Sources.
Gibbon, E. (1929), The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
ed. J.B. Bury, 6 vols, 2nd edition (London).
Ginzberg, L. (1920), The Legends of the Jews, vol. II (New York).
Grauert, H. (1882), ‘Die Konstantinisches Schenkung’, Historisches
Jahrbuch, 3-29.
Gregorovius, E. (1971), Rome and Medieval Culture. Selections from the
History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages, ed. K.E. Morrison, trans.
G.W. Hamilton (Chicago).
Grigg, R. (1977), ‘Constantine the Great and the Cult without Images’,
Viator 8, 1-32.
Hall, L.J. (1998), ‘Cicero’s instinctu divino and Constantine’s instinctu
divinitatis: The Evidence of the Arch of Constantine for the Senatorial
View of the Vision’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 6, 647-71.
Hall, S.G. (1998), ‘Some Constantinian Documents in the Vita Constantini’,
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Constantine 06 Biblio
132
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MAPS
Constantine 07 MAPS
133
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Constantine_07_MAPS
134
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The Mediterranean World in the Age of Constantine
Byzantine Jerusalem
Constantine_07_MAPS
135
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136
CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
Mediaeval Rome
Constantine_07_MAPS
136
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INDEX TO THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
Acheron 17
Achilles 50
allegory 47
ancestral custom etc. 13, 37, 47,
50, 55
Antony, Mark 44
Apollo 41
Arcadia 51
Argo 50
Assyria(n) 37-39, 47, 48
Augustus 1, 44
Aurelian 58
Babylon 37
birth 4, 20, 23, 24, 36
blasphemy 22, 27, 40
Cambyses 39, 40
chance 8, 10, 11
chaos 27
Christ 3, 7, 20, 40, 43
in acrostic 42
birth of 23, 36, 44, 45
creator 25
death of 21
divinity of 22, 25,40, 46, 52
judge 43, 44
miracles of 25, 26, 34, 35
return of 41, 43
Saviour 2, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26,
37, 39, 43, 44, 47, 48, 62
second god 15
son of God 22, 23, 33, 40
Wisdom 24
Word 3, 15, 16
Church 3, 49, 54
Cicero 44
Constantine Augustus 1
education of 4, 20
as king 62
in Nicomedia 59
travels of 37
trophies of 53
victorious 1, 61, 62
creatures 8, 48
Cross 43
Cumae 41
Daniel 38-40
Daphne 41
‘dearest city’ 53
Decius 57
demons 18
Diocletian 58
divine, the 57, 60
Eden (unnamed) 7
Egypt(ian) 14, 37
Erythraean Sibyl 41, 44, 52
Eusebius Pamphilus 62
Exodus narrative 34
fall of man 28, 30,31,48
fate 8, 9, 33
fire 31, 56, 59
fortune 10, 20
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138
CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTENDOM
God 4, 41
commands of 27, 28, 30, 32, 34,
37, 56, 61, 62
creator 5, 9, 13, 16, 24, 30
enemies of 27, 30, 53, 59
faith in 31, 48, 54, 56,58,61
fatherhood of 4, 16, 20, 23, 25,
33, 34, 50
judge 31, 42, 43,46
knowledge of 28, 32
mother of 24
nature of 10-12, 14, 20, 21, 27,
30, 33, 52
nod of 35
providence of 6, 9-11, 21, 25,
26, 29, 30, 39, 40, 60-62
rationality of 12, 16, 36
service of 49, 55
victory of 36
worship of 1-3, 16, 19, 22, 28,
31, 33, 39, 52, 56, 61, 62
gods of pagans 4, 6, 7, 16-18, 38,
41, 37, 55, 56
Good, the 4, 53, 57
Greece, Greek 17, 50
heaven(s) 6, 10, 11, 26, 27, 32, 35
hell 17, 31, 32, 43, 57
Holy Spirit 16, 17, 38, 46, 48, 53
humans, place of 7, 8, 30-32
hymns 5, 6, 19-21,25,29, 40
idolatry 7, 16, 56
impiety 5, 21, 22, 36, 53-5, 58, 60
Italy, Italian(s) 14, 45
Jesus, in acrostic 41, 42.
in Gethsemane 35
See also Christ
Jordan 24
laws 19, 23, 28, 33, 37, 49
Linus 51
Magi 39, 40
magnanimity 12, 25, 27, 29, 34, 38
martyrdom 28, 29
Maxentius (?) 54
Maximinus (?) 55, 61
Memphis 37
metals 12,13, 39
Moses 37, 38
Mother of God 24
Muses 45
mysteries 4, 46
myths 5, 16, 17
nature 2, 8, 13, 30, 51
Nebuchadnezzar 38
Nicomedia 59
Noah 24
Ocean 8, 11, 12, 43
Pan 52
persecutions 55-59
Persia(n) 39, 40, 58
Peter (unnamed) 35
Pharaoh 38
philanthropy (and synonyms) 6, 7,
21, 26, 34, 56, 61
philosophy 13-16, 34, 38
piety, 19,31,53,62
as title 53, 54
Plato 14, 38
poetry 16-19, 44-46, 49, 50, 53
prophecy 2, 6, 24, 36, 41, 43, 50,
59
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INDEX TO THE ORATION TO THE SAINTS
139
providence 4, 9-11, 13, 16, 21, 25,
26, 29, 30, 39, 40, 60-62
Pyriphlegethon 17
Pythagoras 14, 38
rhetoric 4, 20-21
Roman 44, 61
Rome 54, 57
‘dearest city’ 53
sacrifice 23, 37, 40, 47, 55
Sapor 58
Scythian 57
seasons 6, 10
Sibyl 41
Sicilian 45
Socrates 13
Tartarus 43
Thessalian 50
Thrace 51, 58
thunderbolts 39, 59
Tiberius 44
Tiphys 50
Troy 50
tyranny 38, 39, 60
Tyre 51
Valerian 58
vine 12, 51
virginity, deflowered 60
of Church 3
of ‘Maid’ 44-6
of Mary 4, 23,24, 36
of Sibyl as 43
Virgil, anonymous 45
as Maro 49, 52
virtue 3, 9, 20, 25, 26, 28, 31, 33,
34, 40, 57
warfare 2, 3, 6, 18, 23, 35, 53, 54,
57-62
wisdom 20, 25, 26, 30
Word of God 3, 15, 16
world, order of 2, 4-13, 25-7, 51,
53
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INDEX TO TEXTS ON THE DISCOVERY
OF THE CROSS
apostles 75
Calvary 72, 77
as Place of Skull 86, 89
casket 79, 89
Cherubim 73, 74, 86
Christ 64, 66, 71, 82, 84, 87, 91
baptism into 77
belief in 78, 80, 81
death of 69, 73, 75,77, 81, 84, 86
as God 91
as Saviour 67, 75, 77, 87
as Son of God 65, 69, 70, 83, 88
See also Jesus, Lord, Messiah
Christians 65
church(es) 66, 67, 77, 89
Constantine 63, 81
Augustus 64
King 65, 66, 79 (not named), 90
(not named)
Cross, concealment of 70, 72, 85
discovery of 78-80, 86-8
miracles of 76, 78, 88, 89
nails of 77-79, 89, 90
preservation of 78-9, 89
quest for 66, 67, 71, 73, 75, 81,
84, 85
vision of 64, 65
Cyriacus/Kyriakos 78, 79, 89, 90
Dannbe 64, 65
David 82
devil, demons 76, 80, 88-90
Eternal (?) 67
Eusebius of Rome 66, 77, 89
feast of Cross 79
God 63, 65, 67,
as creator 73, 74
as father of Christ 65, 69, 70
See also Lord
Gospels 66
Helena, and Judas 72-3, 85-6
death of 79, 91
faith of 66, 77, 81, 89
first speech 67-8, 82
second speech 68-9, 83
seeks nails 78, 89
threats of 67, 71, 85
Hebrew(s) 70, 73, 84, 86, 89
Holy Spirit 66, 76-8, 82, 85
horse 79
Ilium 72, 86
Isaiah 82
Israel 69, 75, 83, 87
Jerusalem 67, 79, 81, 87, 89, 90
Jesus 69, 74, 76, 78, 82-4, 89, 91
Jews 67, 76, 79, 81, 88, 90
Joseph 74
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INDEX TO TEXTS ON THE DISCOVERY OE THE CROSS 141
Judaea 79
Nazareth 76, 88
Judas, baptism of 77, 89
New Testament 77
death of 80
Nones 80
handed over 70-71, 85
miracles of 76, 79, 88
Old Testament 77
ordeal of 71, 72, 86
prayer of 73-5, 86, 87
Pharisees 70, 84
speech to Jews 69-70, 83
See also Cyriacus
Rome 64, 66, 77, 89
Judas Iscariot 76
Kalends 79
Sadducees 70, 84
Saul 71, 84
Lord 67, 68, 70, 73, 75, 78, 80, 81,
scriptures 67, 68, 77
September 91
85-9, 91
Seraphim 74, 86
Stephen 70, 75
Mary 74, 80, 87
as Mother of God 91
Tartarus 74
May 79, 80
Trinity 91
Messiah 70, 83
Troad 72
Moses 74, 87
Zaccheus 69, 83
nails 77-79, 89, 90
Constantine_08_lndex
141
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INDEX TO THE EDICT OF CONSTANTINE
Africa 108
Alemanni 92
Alexandria 106
Antioch 106
apostles 94, 98-100, 102, 106-9,
111, 114
April 115
army 110
Asia 108
baptism 98, 101, 104, 109
baptistery 107
Britons 92
Byzantium 113
Capitol 99
‘catholic and apostolic’ 111
chamberlains 111
Christ, as God 97, 98, 101, 102,
109, 111, 114
as Lord 94, 96-9, 101, 102, 105,
107, 112, 114
miracles of 98
as Son of God 92, 94, 96, 97,
104, 106
as Saviour 94, 97, 98, 102, 106,
107, 109, 114
as Word 96-8
Christian(s) 95, 106, 113
clergy 110-112
Collar 109
Constantine, baptism of 103, 104
conversion of 101
donation of 106-114
illness of 99-100
titles of 92, 115
Constantinople 106
consuls 110, 115
Cross 104, 108
crown 112
diadem 112
doorkeepers 111
electmm 108
fall of man 97
father, as title of God 92, 94-6, 98,
104
as title of pope 93, 95, 99, 102,
108, 111, 113, 114
in plural 115
Gallicanus 115
Germans 92
God, 111, 114, 115 (Divinity)
as Creator 95-7, 103
as Father 92, 94-6, 98, 103, 104
as lord 92
as Saviour 92
as Trinity 92, 104
worship of 102, 106, 112
See also Christ, Lord, Trinity
Goths 92
Greece 108
Constantine_08_lndex
142
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INDEX TO EDICT OF CONSTANTINE
143
Holy Spirit 92, 94, 104
at birth of Christ 98, 103
Lord, giver of life 96
seal of 104
horse(men) 110, 111
Huns 93
Italy 108, 113
Jerusalem 106
Jesus 94, 96-99, 102, 103, 107,
114
Judaea 108
Kalends 115
Lateran 103, 107, 109
leprosy 99, 104
linen 111
Lord 92, 94, 96-9, 101-3
mantle 109
Mary 98, 103
mitre 109
patricians 110
Paul 94, 100, 102, 109, 114
death of 107
grave of 108
Peter 94, 100, 102, 104, 105, 109,
112, 114, 115
grave of 108
see of 94, 106
Phrygian cap 109, 112
pontiff, as title 95, 99, 106, 108,
109,111-114
pope, as title 93, 95, 102, 109, 111-
114
portraits 102, 103
pragmatic constitution 113
Roman Church 94, 104, 106, 107,
no, 114
Roman people 105, 108
Rome 93, 106, 109, 110, 113, 114,
115
Sarmatians 92
Satan 95, 97 (as devil), 103, 114 (as
devil)
satraps 103, 105, 114
sceptre 110
senate 105, 110, 111, 114
Serenity, as title 95, 100, 106
shoes 111
Silvester, and Constantine 103
creed of 98, 99, 104, 105
in hiding 101
titles of 93, 95, 99, 102, 103,
108, 109, 111-114
vestments of 109, 110
Soracte 101
Thrace 108
Trinity 92, 96, 99
tunic 109
Constantine_08_lndex
143
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Constantine 08 Index
144
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